In April 2010, Dr. Katja Schenke-Layland received the prestigious Morphological Sciences Award of the American Association of Anatomists (AAA) at the annual Experimental Biology 2010 conference in Anaheim, California, USA. She was awarded this prize for her work in the area of minimally invasive microscopy of extracellular matrix structures within blood vessels and the heart. Her scientific endeavors open up an important new field of research combining anatomy, stem cell biology and tissue engineering technologies.