Prof. Dr. Bart Loeys is department head ad interim at the Center of Medical Genetics and head of the Rare Diseases function at Antwerp University Hospital. He is a professor at the University of Antwerp and visiting professor at the Radboud University Medical Centre in Nijmegen. He graduated as a physician in 1995 from the University of Ghent and was a clinical genetics researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA between 2001 and 2005. He specialised as a paediatrician in Belgium and is certified as a clinical geneticist by the American Board of Medical Genetics. He obtained his PhD in 2004 with a thesis on ‘Genotypic and phenotypic study of congenital elastic fibre defects’. Prof. Dr. Loeys has a specific interest in cardiogenetics and especially the hereditary causes of aortic dilations and dissections.