Professor Hans FA Vasen, is a specialist in internal medicine and since 1985 medical director of the Netherlands Foundation for the Detection of Hereditary Tumours and staff member at the Department of Gastroenterology & Hepatology at the Leiden University Medical Centre. He established a large register of families with an inherited predisposition to cancer in the Netherlands.

His main interest is the identification of families at risk for hereditary cancer, development of surveillance protocols and translating the results from molecular genetic studies into clinical practice. He published more than 350 articles in peer-reviewed journals. Since 2000, he is editor-in-chief of Familial Cancer.