Jorick Vink is a Senior Research Astronomer at Armagh Observatory, Northern Ireland. His primary research interests include mass loss from massive stars as a function of metallicity, line polarimetry to probe circumstellar geometries in massive evolved as well as young stars (as to study star formation), and in Horizontal Branch morphologies.Dr. Vink organized the Joint Discussion "Very massive stars in the local universe", which took place at the IAU General Assembly 2012 in Beijing, and where international top specialist in the field presented and discussed their research.