Hence JM Verhagen, MD, PhD, did his medical training in The Netherlands, Zimbabwe and the UK. After surgical training, his Vascular Surgery fellowship was done at The Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney, Australia, where he developed his special interest in minimal-invasive therapies and endovascular aneurysm treatment. After being Associate Professor at the University Medical Center in Utrecht, he was appointed as Professor, Chief, and Head of training, of Vascular Surgery at the Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
He has organized many international training courses on (T)EVAR and is the founder of the Dutch course on peripheral percutaneous vascular interventions. He has performed several "first in Man" implantations of aortic endografts and was global Principal Investigator (PI) of several Aortic Stentgrafts.
Professor Hence Verhagen has extensive experience in vascular diseases, Aortic interventions, and cutting-edge endovascular technologies, and build the largest center for endovascular complex aortic interventions of the country. Furthermore, he is co-founder of the Cardiovascular Center Erasmus MC, scientific board member of the Dutch Institute for Clinical Auditing and consultant/scientific advisor for several medical device companies. He is the former president of both the European Society for Vascular Surgery (ESVS) as well as the Dutch Society for Vascular Surgery, and was member of the executive board of the ESVS and the Dutch Surgical Society for several years. He has written over 375 publications in peer-reviewed scientific medical journals, guided many PhD students, is member of international vascular societies, reviewer for international scientific journals, faculty member and speaker at countless international scientific conferences, where he gave many keynote lectures. He was visiting professor in several of the most prestigious hospitals in the USA and was awarded the Honorary Fellowship of the Vascular Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Recently, he completed the executive course "Managing Health Care Delivery" at Harvard Business School, Boston, USA, which widened his managerial and leadership skills and helped him to start the Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) Academy to increase awareness for, and setup training programs in, vascular disease and aortic pathology. It also helped him organizing a large international F2F meeting in the middle of the COVID pandemic. Currently, he is global PI of 2 international RCTs studying outcomes of different stentgrafts for aortic aneurysmal disease.