At the beginning of the coming year, 2023, Professor Cees Van der Vleuten is retiring. To mark this occasion, his university, Maastricht University, in the Netherlands, will pay him a well-deserved tribute for his outstanding track record in the field of medical education.

Professor van der Vleuten has a master's degree in Psychology and a PhD in Education and has carried out his entire professional career, since 1982, at the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences of Maastricht University. In 1996, he was appointed Professor of Education and Director of the Department of Educational Research and Development at that faculty, a position he held until 2014. From 2005 to 2020 he was Scientific Director of the School of Health Professions Education, which teaches postgraduate, master's and doctoral programmes in education in health sciences to students from different countries. He has also mentored many researchers in medical education and has supervised more than 90 postgraduate and doctoral students.

Professor van der Vleuten always comments on how, when he took up his tenure at the faculty, he noticed that even though medical teachers were trained to make decisions based on the available evidence, when they put on their 'teacher hat', they seemed to drop all their critical thinking about what works and what doesn't, and they put their trust in tradition and intuition. Van der Vleuten has always had very clear ideas in this regard, and has defended the notion that medical education is a scientific field like any other, in which rigorous research must be carried out in order to find the scientific foundations on which to base the educational decisions that are made and provide them with the best available scientific evidence.

Therefore, it is not surprising that throughout his professional life he has conducted a great deal of research on different aspects of medical education, focusing especially on the development of active learning methodologies, on problem-based learning, on the teaching and assessment of clinical skills, and particularly on the assessment of professional skills, and their different tools. In recent years, he has developed and disseminated a new concept in medical education, that of programmatic assessment, which has become a new paradigm in this field.

Listing all his academic achievements would far exceed the length of an editorial. By way of summary, we could mention that the results of his intense research work have given rise to countless publications, more than 700 articles in high-impact international journals, 7 international books, 102 chapters in international books, as well as many national publications with a total H index of 122. He has been responsible for 16 funded research projects.

It is also noteworthy that he has given more than 200 lectures or conferences in different countries around the world and has developed more than 70 consultancies worldwide. He has also received more than 40 awards or recognitions for his professional career, three of which are especially notable: the John P. Hubbard Award, for his significant contribution to the research and development of the evaluation of medical competence from the National Board of Medical Examiners (2005); the Richard Farrow Gold Medal award from the Association for the Study of Medical Education (ASME) in the United Kingdom, for his significant contribution to medical education; and most especially the Award for Research in Medical Education from the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm in 2012, for his important research activity in medical education. He is also a member of the editorial committees of the main international journals on medical education.

I had the chance and the good fortune to meet Cees van der Vleuten for the first time in 1989. At that time I was just starting out on my career in medical education and I attended a course held at the Maastricht Medical School on 'Two decades of experience in problem-solved learning'. Later, in 1994, I met him again at MedEd21, International Congress on Medical Education, which he himself organised in Maastricht and I became a member of its Advisory Board. Although these meetings were limited, in 2007, I was proposed as a member of the AMEE Executive Committee, which he also belonged to, and our relationship became more continuous over a period of 6 years, during which I never ceased to learn so much from his knowledge and experience.

Later, I also coincided with him at numerous AMEE conferences. More recently, in November 2021, after being invited by Professor Stefan Lindgren, former president of the WFME, I met Cees again in Lund, Sweden, to participate in the symposium 'An international perspective on the new Swedish 6-year undergraduate medical education', where I had the fortune to be able to be on the panel with him and with John Norcini, another international leading figure in medical education. For me, this was both a real honour and a real challenge.

Cees van der Vleuten has always had a close relationship with medical education in our country and especially with the Medical Education Foundation. He is a member of the Editorial Committee of our journal and has contributed to it with several articles. In addition, whenever he has been asked to collaborate, he has always found gaps in his busy schedule to help us. Thus, for example, in 2011, he gave the Miriam Friedman Lecture on the topic 'New Trends in Assessment' at the Meeting of the Spanish Society for Medical Education held in Valladolid and in 2019 he participated in the Meeting on Assessment of Physicians within the framework of the courses of the Menorca School of Public Health in 2019. On this occasion, in his talk on 'Programmatic assessment and its application to the medical students' assessment' he spoke to us about this new paradigm in assessment, using his own professional career as an example to illustrate the concept.

On a personal level, I must say that Cees is an affable, open, easy-going and pleasant person who is always willing to help, and stands out for his tremendous communication skills. He enjoys sailing and good cuisine, both of which he practises on a regular basis, and he takes advantage of his numerous trips all over the world to get to know and appreciate the gastronomy of the countries he visits.

Now that his academic life at the faculty is coming to an end, I would like to thank him for his friendship and warmth, for everything he has taught us and for his contribution to the activities of the Medical Education Foundation. I hope that, in addition to continuing to spread his expert knowledge, he is able to fully enjoy this new stage of his life. May this brief editorial serve as a small tribute to Professor Cees van der Vleuten, a true reference in medical education.