Jacques Marescaux is Professor of Surgery, Founder and Member of the Board of the Institute of Image-Guided Surgery (IHU Strasbourg) and President and Founder of IRCAD (1994) a uniquely structured institute advancing the field of surgery into the information era. In addition he founded the European Institute for Telesurgery (EITS) as a training facility to disseminate the groundbreaking work at IRCAD. Over the last 27 years this center has gained international acclaim by training more than 45,000 surgeons from 124 countries, and mirror IRCAD institutes have been created in Taiwan (2008) and Brazil (Sao Paulo’s state in 2011 and Rio de Janeiro in 2017). After the project in Beirut (Lebanon) in 2019, a fifth mirror Institute will be inaugurated in 2021 in Kigali (Rwanda) to train African surgeons in new minimally invasive surgical techniques. An Additional IRCAD Institute will be created in Wuxi, near Shanghai, China in 2022. In addition, discussions are currently underway for the creation of a mirror institute in the United States and in India. In 2000, the IRCAD implemented a Virtual online University, WeBSurg, resulting from the need to maintain the link between the training center and the surgeons. WeBSurg encapsulates high-quality technology with high-speed multimedia communication systems to broadcast pre-recorded surgical interventions; the website is available in 6 different languages (French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Chinese). In 2001, Professor Marescaux performed the first transcontinental laparoscopic surgery on a patient in Strasbourg France while being in New York; this is known as “Operation Lindbergh” (Nature 2001;413:379-380 – Annals of Surgery 2002;235:487-492). On April 2, 2007, he is believed to be the first in the world to operate a patient without leaving a scar (Archives of Surgery 2007;142:823-826). Jacques Marescaux and his team published up to 4,800 national and international articles and communications, among them Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Annals of Surgery, Archives of Surgery. He has received honorary degrees from a number of Universities and honorary fellowships at the Royal College of Surgeons in London and the Japanese society of endoscopic surgery, and is member of a range of Editorial Boards. He was made Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur (1999), Officier dans l'Ordre national du Mérite (2007), Officier de la Légion d’honneur (2012) and Commandeur de la Légion d’Honneur (2019). Jacques Marescaux was invited to deliver more than 450 speeches in many European, American, Japanese, and Chinese Universities or Schools of Medicine, amongst which the “Address to Diplomates” he gave at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, the Nobel Lecture he gave in Stockholm, and the Fogarty Lecture he gave at Stanford University. He also presented a conference entitled “The Anatomic Lesson” at the Amsterdam Medical Center as well as the Antoni de Gimbernat Lecture “New technologies in minimally invasive surgery” at the “XIX Jornades de Cirurgia Als Hospitals de Catalunya” in Barcelona.