Sir Magdi Yacoub is one of the world's most respected heart surgeons. Born in Bilbeis, Egypt, in 1935, he trained as a doctor at Cairo University before moving to the UK to specialise in heart surgery. Over more than six decades, he became a pioneer in the field, carrying out the UK and Europe's first combined heart and lung transplant and helping establish the world's largest heart and lung transplant programme. Alongside his surgical career, he has trained generations of doctors as a professor at Imperial College London and has written over a thousand articles sharing his knowledge. He was knighted in the 1992 New Year Honours for his services to medicine and surgery. Now in his nineties, he continues to lead research into growing new heart valves and organs, still driven by the same curiosity that shaped his whole career.

Magdi Yacoub is known for pushing the boundaries of what heart surgery could achieve. His curiosity drove him to constantly ask what might be possible, leading him to attempt operations no one had tried before, including the UK's first heart and lung transplant. He carried this same curiosity into his nineties, still exploring how to grow new heart valves and organs from stem cells long after most surgeons would have stopped.

His sense of fairness shines through at his Aswan Heart Centre in Egypt, which offers world-class care completely free of charge, regardless of a patient's background. This same fairness led him to travel and operate across the world, from Nigeria to Mozambique, wherever specialist heart care was hardest to reach.

And his kindness drives Chain of Hope, the charity he founded to give children in war-torn and developing countries access to life-saving heart care they could otherwise never afford. Even after retiring from the NHS, he kept operating on children through the charity, choosing to keep giving his time long after he could have stepped back.