Dr. Jan van Eys was born in 1929 in Hilversum, the Netherlands. He earned his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Vanderbilt in 1955, and and M.D. from the University of Washington School of Medicine in 1966. He served postdoctoral fellowships at the McCollum Pratt Institute at Johns Hopkins from 1955-1957, and was an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 1957 to 1966. In 1968, he was appointed to the pediatrics faculty, where he specialized in hematology and oncology. In 1969 he was appointed Chief of the Pediatric Hematology Clinic at Vanderbilt, and eventually rose to the rank of professor in 1973. Clinically, van Eys focused on the care of hemophiliacs and promoted the idea of self-administration of clotting factors. In 1973, Dr. Van Eys left Vanderbilt to become chairman of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and later was named the chair of the division of pediatrics at University of Texas Medical School in Houston. During that time, he developed an ancillary interest in ethics and published extensively in that field, as well as in oncology and biochemistry. After retiring from the University of Texas in 1994, van Eys returned to Vanderbilt to serve as a clinical professor of pediatrics and took on the role of senior scholar in the Ethics Center. In 2006 his longtime service to Vanderbilt was recognized by his elevation to clinical professor of pediatrics, emeritus.