Eelco de Bree was born on December 5th, 1966 in Utrecht, the Netherlands. After graduating from the University of Utrecht Medical School, he moved to Greece in 1991. He completed his residency of General Surgery in the Medical School of Crete University Hospital in Heraklion, Greece, and became a board-certified surgeon in Greece and in the Netherlands. After a 2-year fellowship at the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital / Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam, he returned to Greece in 2000. Since then, he has been a surgical staff member at the Department of Surgical Oncology of the University Hospital in Heraklion, Greece. He successfully presented his thesis entitled ‘Objective assessment of the contribution of diagnostic methods in malignant jaundice’ at the Medical School of Crete in 1999. In 2004 he became Assistant Professor of Surgery, in March 2015 Associate Professor of Surgery, in February 2016 Associate Professor of General Surgery and Surgical Oncology and in February 2020 Professor of General Surgery and Surgical Oncology at the Medical School of Crete. Meanwhile, in 2014, he also received the certification of Surgical Oncologist in the Netherlands. Accordingly, he is registered as General Surgeon as well as Surgical Oncologist in the Specialist Register of the Royal Dutch Medical Association. He has published more than 110 papers in international peer-reviewed journals (H-index 27, more than 3900 citations) and more than 50 papers in national journals, while he is author of 11 chapters in medical books. He has been Editor-in-Chief of the journal ‘Hellenic Surgical Oncology’ from 2014 until 2017 and currently he is Associate Editor of the ‘Hellenic Journal of Surgery’. He is a reviewer for 80 international journals, a member of the Editorial Board of eight international journals, while he is a member of numerous international medical societies, mainly concerning surgical oncology. He has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Hellenic Society of Surgical Oncology from 2014 until 2017. He has been member of several committees at the Medical School of Crete, such as the Committee for Postgraduate Studies (from 2011 until today). During the last years he is performing annually a wide variety of approximately 250 operations under general anaesthesia and 150 operations with local anaesthesia, mostly in oncological patients. His topics of interest are surgical oncology in general, and more specifically melanoma, sarcoma, peritoneal carcinomatosis, hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy, ovarian, colorectal and breast cancer.