Dr. Luc Mertens has been the Medical Director of the Cardiovascular Program at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa since April 2025. Dr. Luc Mertens graduated with a medical degree from the University of Leuven, Belgium and acquired a doctoral degree in Medical Sciences. He went on to complete specialized training in Pediatrics and Pediatric Cardiology at the University Hospitals Leuven and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, USA. From 1998 – 2008, Dr. Mertens worked as a consultant pediatric cardiologist for the University Hospitals Leuven, Belgium. He moved to Toronto in 2008 where he became the Medical Director of the Echocardiography Laboratory and later also Co-Director of the Pulmonary Hypertension Program at the Labatt Family Heart Centre at the Hospital for Sick Children. He was promoted to Full Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Toronto in 2013. He worked as a Senior Associate Scientist in the Translational Medicine Program at the SickKids Research Institute.
His research work focused on developing novel non-invasive imaging techniques for assessing cardiac and vascular function in children with congenital and acquired heart disease. He directed and developed the Cardiovascular Ultrasound Laboratory at the SickKids Research Institute that specializes in developing, validating and clinically translating novel ultrasound techniques. He has published close to 400 peer-reviewed papers in leading cardiovascular journals and co-edited one of the leading textbooks in pediatric echocardiography. His most recent research work was on developing ultrafast ultrasound technology for clinical application in children with heart disease, including Cardio-oncology patients. He chaired the Writing Committee on Multimodality Imaging for Cardiac Surveillance of Cancer Treatment in Children: Recommendations from the American Society of Echocardiography published in 2023.