Starting on December 6th, Dr. Pieter Smits joins our Board of Directors. We are delighted to have him join the organization.

Pieter C. Smits, M.D., Ph.D., FESC

Dr. Smits is currently Director of the Interventional Cardiology Department of Maasstad Hospital Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Furthermore, he was board member of the Netherlands Heart Registration, the national registry of all cardiac procedure in the Netherlands. Till he joind the Directors team of CERC, Massy, France on 1 December 2021.

He completed his medical education and training in Utrecht/Nieuwegein, the Netherlands and has been registered as a cardiologist since 1997 when he joined the staff at the Cardiology and Experimental Cardiology Department of the University Hospital Utrecht. His thesis was about “Clinical Aspects of Angioscopy and Intravascular Ultrasound”. 

In 1999 he became an interventional cardiologist at the Cardiology Department at the Thorax Center of the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam under the supervision of Prof. Serruys and in 2003 became the Clinical Director of the Catherization and Intervention Department of the Thorax Center. In 2005 he left the Thorax Center and became one of the founders of the Interventional Cardiology Department of Maasstad Hospital Rotterdam, the second PCI center of Rotterdam and currently the largest in the region with over 2000 PCI a year.

He is the lead investigator of several large multi-center trials, Like COMPARE, COMPARE II, COMPARE-ACUTE, COMPARE-ABSORB, COMPARE 60/80 HBR and MASTER-DAPT. He has been involved in over 250 peer reviewed papers in the field of interventional cardiology of which he is the first or senior author of 2 NEJM and 2 Lancet papers.