Special Plenary Session 1: COVID 19 Cytometry

Andrea Cossarizza is a Full Professor of Pathology and Immunology, Vice President of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, and current Past President of ISAC. He has been studying the molecular and cellular basis of several diseases that involve the immune system for 35 years. He is currently at the forefront of the fight against COVID-19, and has provided the first contributions regarding the importance of cytometry in understanding the immune response to SARS-CoV-2. As of May 2020, he has published 332 papers on peer reviewed journal, has an H index of 79 and has received over 33,000 citations.

Attila Tarnok is a Professor of Immunology and Cytomics. He studied biology and received his Ph.D. in biophysics at the University of Hamburg. He then worked at the Bernhard-Nocht-Institute for Tropical Diseases, Hamburg, the Center for Molecular Neurobiology Hamburg and the MRC Hammersmith, London. From 1996 to 2016 he directed the research facility for pediatric cardiology at the University of Leipzig Heart Center. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of Cytometry Part A, SPIE Fellow and Guest Professor at Tsinghua and Shandong University, China. He has authored over 300 publications, edited several textbooks and organizes regular conferences on high-content single-cell analysis. His research interests are new technologies for high-content cytometry and predictive medicine.

Professor Andreas Radbruch is a biologist by training, having done his Ph.D. at the Genetics Institute of Cologne University.  He has been the Director of the German Rheumatism Research Centre Berlin, a  Leibniz institute, since 1996 and Professor of Rheumatology at the Charité Medical School of the Humboldt University of Berlin since 1998.  Andreas Radbruch is a former President of ISAC and the current President of the European Federation of Immunological Societies (EFIS).

Dr. Kvistborg's scientific training has been focused on tumor immunology, starting already during her Master internship at the Danish Cancer Society. For her post-doctoral training she joined the group of Ton Schumacher at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam. Three years ago, she transitioned into independence with financial support from The Netherlands Cancer Institute and the Dutch Cancer Society. Throughout her training, the focus has been on what T cells see on cancer cells. During her post-doctoral training, technological developments made it feasible to dissect the neoantigen-specific T cell response in cancer. This work has been a significant contribution to understanding what is driving the foreignness of some tumor types, and earned her the Presidential Award for Excellence from ISAC in 2014. Dr. Kvistborg's lab is building on this work and taking the next steps in characterizing the tumor-specific T cell response in cancer and upon anti-cancer therapies.

Pratip Chattopadhyay, PhD is an Associate Professor (Pathology) and founding Director of NYU Langone Health’s Precision Immunology Laboratory (PIL). His laboratory performs independent research in tumor immunology and provides cutting-edge immune monitoring services for a wide variety of biomedical disciplines (cancer, infectious disease, rheumatology). We use high parameter cytometry technologies, including 30-parameter flow cytometry and combined protein/mRNA analysis by RNA sequencing (molecular cytometry), to reveal biomarkers that predict patient outcomes, better understand disease pathogenesis, and inform rational design of combination drug therapies.

Dr. Galbraith is a Professor in the University of Arizona School of Plant Sciences, and is a member of the Bio5 Institute, the Arizona Cancer Center. He has an adjunct membership in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, and is an Associate of the Institute for the Environment. He was recently appointed Honorary Dean of the School of Life Sciences at Henan University, Kaifeng, China. He was trained at Cambridge University, and held a NATO postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University. His first academic appointment was at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Dr. Galbraith's research interests include biological instrumentation, developmental, tissue and cell-specific gene expression in eukaryotes, functional genomics and proteomics, and issues in biodiversity.

After graduate school, Monica quickly found her passion for flow cytometry using a FACScan in her first lab in the department of Rheumatology at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. In 2008, she created and managed the Research Flow Cytometry Core at Cincinnati Children’s. Over the next ten years she helped facilitate the growth of the core in instrumentation, infrastructure, staff and clientele. She became very active in the cytometry community by co-founding a local cytometry organization, joining the Flow Cytometry Research Group through the Association for Biomolecular Resource Facilities (ABRF) and serving on ISAC Council from 2014-2018. In addition, she served as a member of the organizing committee for the Core Managers workshop for GLIIFCA, chaired the ISAC SRL Services Committee and served on other ISAC committees. She remains a member of the ISAC Membership Services Committee. Most recently she found her passion steer towards industry and joined Cytek Biosciences to help support customers that are using the Aurora spectral cytometer. She is now the US Manager of Application Support, leading a team of talented Applications Specialists for Cytek.

Jonni Moore, Ph.D. is a Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Scientific Director of the Abramson Cancer Center Flow Cytometry and Cell Sorting Shared Resource, and Emeritus Director, Founder, and currently Senior Advisor of the Clinical Flow Cytometry Laboratory at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently the President of ISAC.  She received her PhD from Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia in Microbiology and completed a postdoc with Peter Nowell, MD at the University of Pennsylvania.

Virginia Litwin, PhD is a thought-leader in analytical method validation and standardization for flow cytometry. Bringing “Cytometry from Bench-to-Bedside” has been the focus of her professional activities since 1999 when she started working in translational medicine at Bristol-Myers Squibb. She is the chair of the Document Development Committee for a new Clinical Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) Guideline, H62- Validation of Assays Performed by Flow Cytometry. She is a councilor for both the International Society for the Advancement of Cytometry (ISAC) and the International Clinical Cytometry Society (ICCS). In addition, she serves on the ICCS Advocacy Committee whose mission is to interface with regulatory agencies.

Sara De Biasi is interested in the dynamics of T cell homeostasis and functions in conditions of acquired immunodeficiencies, with a special focus on HIV infection and solid organ transplantation and related therapies. More recently, her work focused on multiple sclerosis as a model to study autoimmunity. In particular, she is investigating the role of innate-like T cells (iNKT cells), rare cell populations among peripheral blood mononuclear cells. In addition, she took advantage of the experience acquired in the field of rare events detection such as iNKT cells to study circulating endothelial cells (CEC), their precursor (EPC) in different type of cancers.