In 1967, South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard, M.B.B.S., performed the world’s first heart transplant, making international headlines. One of the people paying attention to the news was a young W Steves Ring, M.D., just months into his first year of medical school.

It’s no coincidence that Dr. Ring eventually became the pioneering force behind UT Southwestern’s vaunted Heart Transplant Program.

Results of early heart transplants around the world were disappointing, and for a while enthusiasm waned. But by the mid-1980s, interest had revived. In 1988, Dr. Ring, a thoracic surgeon who had trained at Harvard, Duke, and the University of Minnesota, was recruited as Chief of the Division of Thoracic Surgery at UT Southwestern with the drive to create the Medical Center’s heart and lung transplant programs.

On June 27, 1988, Dr. Ring, who had been doing heart transplants in Minnesota, performed his first heart transplant for UT Southwestern at the former St. Paul Medical Center on writer/historian A.C. Greene. Mr. Greene, who lived for almost 14 years following the operation, wrote a book about his experience and the joy of getting a second chance at life.

Throughout his career, giving patients the ability to have fuller lives motivated Dr. Ring, whose own story includes a chapter on being named Professor Emeritus of Cardiovascular & Thoracic Surgery after an inspiring, long series of lifesaving surgeries.

“The first three heart transplant patients at UT Southwestern all lived more than 10 years. Thirty-six of the first 37 lived more than a year, and most of them lived a lot longer than that. It was a successful program right from the beginning,” Dr. Ring said. The 10-year survival rate of heart transplant patients from 1990-1995 was 49%, according to an article in the Annals of Thoracic Surgery.

One year after the Heart Transplant Program began, Dr. Ring had the lung transplant initiative up and running, and it was equally successful. Today, both programs are among the busiest in the country, with survival rates consistently above the national average. The current median length of survival in the U.S. for heart transplants is 12 years, according to the American Heart Association, and six years for lung transplants, based on National Institutes of Health statistics.

Dr. Ring also launched the heart transplant program at Children’s Medical Center Dallas in 1988.

In addition to transplants, Dr. Ring performed countless surgeries on children with congenital heart issues, as well as valve repairs, revascularizations, and other heart surgeries on high-risk adult cardiac patients.

The work was intense. “We all worked 90-hour weeks,” Dr. Ring said of he and his thoracic surgery colleagues. But the outcomes justified the work.

“You have an enormous impact on people’s lives. To get a high-risk kid or high-risk adult through a complicated surgery is very rewarding. More than 90% of the time, I was going to make their life better than it was before. There are very few areas of medicine where you can say that,” he said.

A highlight of Dr. Ring’s career came in 2000 when the Division of Thoracic Surgery became the Department of Cardiovascular & Thoracic Surgery.

A decade later, Dr. Ring had reached a decision. In 2010, at age 65, Dr. Ring stepped down as head of the Department, handing over the reins to new Chair Michael Jessen, M.D. He pulled back from clinical work to focus on research. He managed the transplant database and worked with residents and colleagues on outcomes-based studies on transplant topics, such as assessing the best regimens for antirejection medications.

Importantly, the change gave him more time with family, including his grandchildren.

He taught his grandsons to play golf. “I told them that if they weren’t beating me by the time they turned 15, they ought to hang it up,” Dr. Ring said. They took on the challenge and started winning over their grandfather. He was thrilled to watch one of his twin grandsons play in a junior North Texas tournament recently.

Dr. Ring said he had mixed emotions when he stepped down as Chair to focus on research, but he was clear that it was time to retire. “I thought I was going to miss the surgery more than I did. I appreciated getting a good night’s sleep. And I really enjoyed seeing my grandchildren grow up.”