Dr. W. Matthijs Blankesteijn is an Associate Professor at the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, CARIM School for Cardiovascular Diseases, Faculty of Health Medicine and Life Sciences (FHML), Maastricht University, the Netherlands. He studied Biology and Chemistry at the Radboud University Nijmegen. After obtaining his MSci degrees (Biology: June 1988, Chemistry: October 1988), he started a PhD project at the Department of Internal Medicine of the Radboud University Hospital. He started as a postdoctoral fellow at the Dept. of Pharmacology, Maastricht University in 1993. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston MA, USA in 1997/1998 he obtained a tenured position at Maastricht University. During his career, he obtained several personal grants, including a NATO travel grant and a ZonMW VIDI grant. He is a principal investigator at CARIM and a Research portfolio holder at the Dept. of Pharmacology and Toxicology. He currently is a member of the Research Council and the Grants & Incentives team of CARIM. His main research focus is on signaling mechanisms controlling the remodeling of the heart in response to a pathological stimulus such as pressure overload or ischemia.