Leon de Windt obtained a Master’s degree in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at Utrecht University in 1994 and a PhD in Cardiovascular Physiology at Maastricht University in 1999. Subsequently, he received an American Heart Association Fellowship for a postdoctoral residence at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute of Prof. Dr. Jeffery D. Molkentin in Cincinnati OH, USA where he studied various signaling mechanisms in cardiac remodeling. In the early phase of his career as group leader at the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht (director Prof.dr. Hans Clevers), his research interests shifted to the pro-hypertrophic mechanisms of calcineurin-responsive transcription factors. Mid 2010, he was appointed as full professor of Molecular Cardiology at CARIM School for Cardiovascular Diseases at Maastricht University, The Netherlands. More recently, his laboratory has gained interest in microRNAs (miRNAs), a class of endogenous, small noncoding RNAs, which suppress protein expression by either messenger RNA degradation or translational inhibition. Each miRNA potentially targets multiple transcripts, suggesting that miRNAs, not unlike transcription factors, play a fundamental role in regulating gene expression. Leon de Windt is the recipient of several Awards, including the Louis N. and Arnold M. Katz Basic Science Research Award for Young Investigators from the American Heart Association; recipient of a 2003 Innovational Research Incentives Scheme VENI and VIDI awards from the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NWO); in 2008 he was selected as core member of a Fondation Leducq Transatlantic Network of Excellence; he is the recipient of the 2012 Outstanding Achievement Award of the ESC Council for Basic Cardiovascular Science as well as the 2012 Galenus Research Prize. In 2013, he received an ERC Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council to support his work.