Dr. Joost J.F.P. Luiken studied Biology at the University of Utrecht (Netherlands) and graduated in 1988, specializing in biochemistry and molecular genetics. After military service and a PhD project on liver metabolism at the University of Amsterdam, he started working at Maastricht University as a postdoc in November 1994 to study the role of fatty acid transporters in the heart. Starting in 1997, he worked for 2½ years in the laboratory of Prof. Bonen, University of Waterloo, Canada, to learn novel techniques to study fatty acid uptake by muscle tissues. In June 1999, he returned to Maastricht on a postdoctoral Dekker stipend of the Netherlands Heart Foundation to introduce these novel techniques. In 2000, he won the prestigious FASEB-award on Endocrinology and Metabolism for his discovery of a novel mechanism of acute regulation of fatty acid uptake via the translocation of fatty acid transporters from intracellular stores to the cell surface. In 2002, he was awarded a prestigious research career grant from the Netherlands Scientific Organization to continue his research on the identification of the cellular machinery involved in fatty acid transporter translocation and to study the role of fatty acid transporters in cardiac disease (diabetic cardiomyopathy). In 2008, he was appointed as Associate Professor within the Department of Genetics & Cell Biology. Since 2021, he has also been a staff scientist at the Department of Clinical Genetics.