Professor Bernard Thienpont trained as a bioengineer and received his PhD from KU Leuven, Belgium, where he made important contributions to genetics, identifying a new genetic syndrome and a new gene that causes heart defects. He then moved to Cambridge, UK, studying the epigenetic causes of heart disease, and afterwards to the VIB Vesalius Research Center, where he researched cancer epigenetics. Since 2018, he heads the Laboratory for Functional Epigenetics in Leuven, where he and his team try to uncover epigenetic causes and biomarkers of human diseases using advanced genomic technologies, including single cell -omics and liquid biopsies. He has a translational research-related publication track record across multiple diseases and has been a principal investigator (or co-PI) in more than 15 national and European projects. He is coordinator of EU projects and cofounder of the Leuven Institute for Single Cell Omics (LISCO). However, his main goal remains translational: improving patient care.