Clinical cardiac electrophysiology includes hospital and outpatient care, as well as interventional procedures for patients with – and the investigation of – cardiac arrhythmia and conduction disorders. As a result of demographic changes and better emergency treatment of heart attacks, for example, the number of patients with atrial or ventricular arrhythmia is now significant. Moreover, this number is constantly increasing. Joris de Groot focuses on the mechanism and treatment of atrial fibrillation in particular.

In his capacity as professor at the UvA, De Groot will concentrate on the pathophysiological processes which give rise to atrial fibrillation in patients who do not respond to pharmacological or invasive treatment of the arrhythmia. He is mainly interested in how the formation and turnover of fibrosis in these patients' hearts differs from fibrosis in patients with treatable atrial fibrillation.

About Joris de Groot

De Groot has worked as a cardiologist at the Academic Medical Center (AMC) since 2008 and is currently head of the Clinical Electrophysiology department. He was appointed AMC Principal Investigator in 2015. In addition to his work as a clinician, he leads the AMC Atrial Fibrillation Research Group and is a member of the steering committees of a number of large, multinational clinical studies on the treatment of atrial fibrillation.

De Groot has obtained a number of different research grants, including a Vidi grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development (ZonMW), as well as a Dekker grant from the Dutch Heart Foundation. He is also a fellow of the European Society of Cardiology and an honorary member of the Korean Society of Cardiology.

De Groot has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles in numerous scientific journals, including The Lancet, the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Circulation, the European Heart Journal and the International Journal of Cardiology.