Dr Jeroen Joost Bax was born in Amsterdam and was the first member of his family to study medicine. As a professor, Dr Bax has mentored over 60 international PhD students in his cardiac imaging research centre at Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) and his students have achieved prominent positions at medical institutions throughout the world. 1 “I care a lot about the new generation and giving them opportunities in the same way that I was given,” he says. 2 He and his wife have two sons, one of whom also went into medicine. 3 Dr Bax studied medicine from 1984 to 1990 and before launching his research career at the University of Miami, where his primary focus was in the field of immunology and basic science. In 1996, he obtained his doctorate from the Free University in Amsterdam on the subject of "metabolic imaging with FDG SPECT" and completed his training as a cardiologist in 2002. He continued his training at the Leiden University Medical Center, where he now works as a general cardiologist with a focus on cardiac imaging. 4 His main interests include clinical cardiology, heart failure, cardiac resynchronisation therapy and the application of all different imaging modalities to these clinical fields. Dr Bax is a professor of cardiology and Director of both Non-invasive Imaging and the Echo Laboratory at the Leiden University Medical Center. He has also served on the editorial boards of various journals, including as Associate Editor for the Journal of the American College of Cardiology and Heart and President of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC). He was elected as ESC president at 50 years of age, making him the youngest president in the Society’s history. 5 Dr Bax has served the ESC in numerous capacities, including chair of the Cardiology Practice Guidelines Committee, Chair of the Scientific Program, Chair of the Press Committee, Co-Chair of two International Conferences on Nuclear Cardiology (ICNC) and Co-Editor of two ESC books on cardiac imaging. 6 He has also authored more than 700 papers in international peer-reviewed journals.