Mattias Van Heetvelde is a member of the European Society of Cardiology Patient Forum (ESCPF) focusing primarily on mental well-being in patients with CVD. Mattias Van Heetvelde is a senior postdoctoral researcher and bioinformatician at the Center for Medical Genetics (CMGG) at Ghent University (UGent) and Ghent University Hospital (UZGent) in Gent, Belgium. He is a Bioscience Engineer (2013) by training and holds a PhD in Health Sciences (2019), in which he researched the attenuation of BRCA1 and BRCA2 expression by small non-coding RNAs and their potential in synthetic lethality. Currently his main professional interests are long-read omics, pipeline tooling, and Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in the context of rare diseases.