The International Scientific Committee for the XXIII International Congress of The Transplantation Society is putting together an exciting Scientific Program for this important and outstanding Congress.
Our distinguished Plenary Speakers are well known and recognized as leaders in transplantation biology and medicine. Please find below Biographies for these exceptional and highly respected Speakers.
Confirmed Plenary Speakers
- Dr. Jeff Bluestone, San Francisco, USA
- Dr. Jack Greenblatt, Toronto, Canada
- Dr. Leroy Hood, Seattle, USA
- Dr. Shaf Keshavjee, Toronto, Canada
- Dr. Christian Larsen, Atlanta, USA
- Dr. Roslyn Mannon, Birmingham, USA
- Dr. Philippa Marrack, Denver, USA
- Dr. Petra Reinke, Berlin, Germany
- Dr. David Sachs, Boston, USA
- Dr. Alberto Sanchez-Fueyo, Barcelona, Spain
- Dr. Hans Schöler, Münster, Germany
- Dr. Doris Taylor, Minneapolis, USA
| Dr. Jeff Bluestone, San Francisco, USA |
Jeffrey A. Bluestone, Ph.D., is the A.W. and Mary Margaret Clausen Distinguished Professor in Metabolism and Endocrinology and director of the Diabetes Center at UCSF. He co-directs the UCSF islet transplantation program and directs the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Collaborative Center for Cell Therapy.
Bluestone's research over the past 25 years has focused on understanding the basic processes that control T-cell activation and immune tolerance in autoimmune disease and islet and organ transplantation.
Dr. Bluestone founded and directs the Immune Tolerance Network, created in 1999 to accelerate the clinical development of immune tolerance therapies, a number of which had been showing great promise in preclinical studies and were nearing clinical investigation. Currently, the ITN is supporting over 25 clinical trials to test tolerogenic therapies in organ transplantation, allergy and asthma, and autoimmune diseases. It is a key goal of the ITN to further define the mechanisms of immune tolerance in the human clinical setting.
Dr. Bluestone received his BS from Cook College, Rutgers State University in 1974. He received his MS in Biology from Rutgers as well, and received his doctorate in Micro-Immunology from the Cornell Graduate School of Medical Science (Sloan-Kettering Division) in 1980. He is the recipient of a number of honors, including the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) Gerold & Kayla Grodsky Basic Science Award and the Mary Tyler Moore & Robert Levine Excellence in Clinical Research Award, JDRF. In 2006 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has published more than 300 full-length publications.
| Dr. Jack Greenblatt, Toronto, Canada |
Dr. Jack Greenblatt is a University Professor and an Anne and Max Tanenbaum Professor of Molecular Medicine in the Banting and Best Department of Medical Research and the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto. His research laboratory is located in the new Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research. He was also a co-founder of the Toronto biotechnology company Affinium Pharmaceuticals. He received his BSc in Physics from McGill University, his PhD in Biophysics from Harvard University and his post-doctoral training at the University of Geneva and the Pasteur Institute in Paris. For most of his research career, Professor Greenblatt has focused on mechanisms that control elongation and termination by bacterial RNA polymerase as well as on mechanisms that control initiation, elongation and termination by yeast and human RNA polymerase II. As well, Professor Greenblatt has employed modern proteomic technologies to explore protein-protein interactions on a whole genome scale for the bacterium E. coli and the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, in the latter case also making use of synthetic genetic arrays to organize yeast protein complexes into biological pathways. The protein interaction technology he has helped develop is now being applied to the laboratory mouse in order to identify genes and proteins involved in human disease.
| Dr. Leroy Hood, Seattle, USA |
Dr. Hood’s research has focused on fundamental biology (immunity, evolution, genomics) and on bringing engineering to biology through the development of five instruments; the DNA and protein sequencers and synthesizers and the ink-jet oligonucleotide synthesizer (making DNA arrays) for deciphering the various types of biological information (DNA, RNA, proteins and systems). In particular, the DNA sequencer has revolutionized genomics by allowing the rapid automated sequencing of DNA, which played a crucial role in contributing to the successful mapping of the human genome during the 1990s and early 2000s. These instruments constitute the technological foundation for modern molecular biology and genomics. He has applied these technologies to diverse fields including immunology, neurobiology, cancer biology, molecular evolution and systems medicine.
Early in his career, he applied these technologies to the study of molecular immunology (and discovered many of the fundamental mechanisms for antibody diversity) and neurobiology (he cured the first neurological disease by gene transfer in mice). In the late 1980s he realized that to really understand immunology, it would require a systems approach, thus, he began thinking about systems biology.
In 1992, Dr. Hood moved to the University of Washington as founder and Chairman of the cross-disciplinary Department of Molecular Biotechnology (MBT) and developed the ink-jet oligonucleotide synthesizer which synthesized DNA chips. At MBT he initiated systems’ studies on cancer biology and prion disease. In 2000, he co-founded the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington, to more effectively continue pioneering systems approaches to biology and medicine. Here he has contributed seminal papers to delineating the systems approach to biology and disease and to pioneer developing new technologies (microfluidics/nanotechnology and molecular imaging) in collaboration with colleagues at Caltech. Dr. Hood is now pioneering the idea that the systems approach to disease, the emerging technologies, and powerful new computational and mathematical tools will move medicine from its current reactive mode to a predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory mode (P4 medicine) over the next 5-20 years.
Dr. Hood was awarded the Lasker Prize in 1987 for his studies on the mechanism of immune diversity. Dr. Hood was also awarded the 2002 Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology for the development of the five different instruments. He received the 2003 Lemelson–MIT Prize for Innovation and Invention for the development of the DNA sequencer. Most recently, Dr. Hood's lifelong contributions to biotechnology have earned him the prestigious 2004 Biotechnology Heritage Award, as well as the 2003 Association for Molecular Pathology (AMP) Award for Excellence in Molecular Diagnostics for his pioneering efforts in molecular diagnostics. In 2006 he received the Heinz Award in Technology, the Economy and Employment, for his extraordinary breakthroughs in biomedical science at the genetic level. In 2007 he was elected to the Inventors Hall of Fame (for the automated DNA sequencer) and in 2008 he received the Pittcon Heritage Award for helping to transform the biotech industry. Dr. Hood has received 17 honorary degrees from Institutions such as Johns Hopkins, Yale, UCLA, and Whitman College. He has published more than 650 peer-reviewed papers, received 15 patents, and has co-authored textbooks in biochemistry, immunology, molecular biology, and genetics, and is just finishing a textbook on systems biology. In addition, he coauthored with Dan Keveles a popular book on the human genome project—The Code of Codes.
Dr. Hood is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Association of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Engineering. Indeed, Dr. Hood is one of only 7 (of more than 6000 members) scientists elected to all three academies (NAS, NAE and IOM). Dr. Hood has also played a role in founding more than 14 biotechnology companies, including Amgen, Applied Biosystems, Systemix, Darwin and Rosetta. He is currently pioneering systems medicine and the systems approach to disease and has recently cofounded the company Integrated Diagnostics—that hopefully will become a platform company for P4 medicine.
Dr. Hood has had a life-long commitment to K-12 science education and has a major effort at ISB in this regard. Dr. Hood enjoys reading, mountaineering, cross-country skiing, sea kayaking and exercise.
| Dr. Shaf Keshavjee, Toronto, Canada |
Dr Keshavjee is a Thoracic Surgeon. He received his medical degree and training in general surgery, cardiac surgery and thoracic surgery at the University of Toronto. He is also a graduate of the Surgical Scientist Training Program at the University of Toronto. He completed further fellowship training at Harvard and University of London in tracheal surgery and heart-lung transplantation before returning to a faculty position at Toronto General Hospital, University of Toronto. He is currently Director of the Toronto Lung Transplant Program, Director of the Latner Thoracic Research Laboratories, and a Senior Scientist at the McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine and the Toronto General Research Institute. He is also Professor and Chair of the Division of Thoracic Surgery at the University of Toronto. His research interest is in lung injury and strategies to repair injured lungs for transplantation using gene therapy and other modalities.
| Dr. Christian Larsen, Atlanta, USA |
Appointed Joseph Brown Whitehead Professor and Chairman of the Department of Surgery, Emory University School of Medicine in February 2009, as well as surgeon-in-chief of Emory University Hospital and director of surgical services for Emory Healthcare, Christian P. Larsen, MD, DPhil, is an internationally recognized leader in kidney, pancreas and islet transplantation and transplant immunology. Dr. Larsen is also associate vice president and executive director of the Emory Transplant Center.
Dr. Larsen received his medical degree magna cum laude from Emory in 1984 and his Doctor of Philosophy in transplantation immunology from the University of Oxford, England, in 1990. After completing his general and transplantation surgery training at Stanford and Emory, where he was chief resident in surgery and a fellow in transplantation surgery, he was appointed to the faculty of the Emory University Department of Surgery in 1991. Dr. Larsen rapidly established himself as a leading transplant surgeon and immunologist and, in 2001, became the first Carlos and Marguerite Mason Professor of Surgery and the founding director of the Emory Transplant Center, an umbrella organization that oversees and integrates all of Emory's academic, clinical and research resources in organ transplantation.
Dr. Larsen's robust surgical practice focuses on kidney, pancreas and islet transplantation and has seen him reach such milestones as the performance of the first islet transplant in Georgia in 2003. In addition to maintaining a high volume clinical schedule, he has built one of the foremost transplantation immunology programs in the world. The Emory Transplant Center now includes 200 members who provide coordinated, patient-focused, multidisciplinary care and conduct multidisciplinary research.
Dr. Larsen is a frequent author of high-impact journal publications and is known for translating discoveries from the bench to the bedside. Together with long-time collaborator and friend Thomas Pearson, MD, DPhil, he has played a pivotal role in developing a new class of immunosuppressive drugs, the costimulation blockers. These studies have spanned 15 years, moving from mice to monkeys to humans. Poised to replace the cyclosporine class of drugs, costimulation blockers have the promise of being just as effective while avoiding the major side effects and toxicities associated with cyclosporine. Dr. Larsen's current scientific endeavors are focused on achieving immunological tolerance through the induction of mixed hematopoietic chimerism and on the application of costimulation blockers to facilitate transplantation of insulin-producing cells (islets) to treat type 1 diabetes.
Dr. Larsen has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health for the past 16 years, is the recipient of a prestigious NIH MERIT award and has directed program project grants, center awards and multi-institutional consortia from the NIH and Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. He is an elected member of the prestigious American Society for Clinical Investigation and is the recipient of both national and international research awards, including the Basic Science Award of the American Society of Transplant Physicians (1997), the Roche Award of the American Society of Transplantation (2001), the Transplantation Society's Roche Award for Excellence in Translational Research (2006), the Thomas E. Starzl Prize in Surgery and Immunology (2007), and the Emory School of Medicine Dean's Distinguished Faculty Lecture and Award (2009).
| Dr. Roslyn Mannon, Birmingham, USA |
Roslyn Mannon, MD, has been named Director of Research for the Alabama Transplant Center. She will also be a Professor in the UAB Division of Nephrology. Dr. Mannon earned her bachelor's degree from Johns Hopkins University and her medical degree from Duke University. Her research involves identifying new mechanisms of graft injury in transplants. She wants to set up a biorepository to collect biopsy tissue and other medical data from abdominal transplant patients so investigators can better study issues such as transplant rejection and graft failure. She would like the repository to expand to include heart and lung transplants as well. Additionally, she hopes to recruit biotechnology companies that work on transplants and transplant-related drugs to Birmingham.
| Dr. Philippa Marrack, Denver, USA |
Immunologist Philippa Marrack is interested in the creation, specificity, survival, and activation of T cells, the cells that orchestrate the specific immune response to antigens. Working as a team with Dr. John Kappler, Marrack has been preeminent in the study of the molecular basis for how T cells recognize antigen. Marrack is studying how they react with fragments of the infection bound to special proteins of the body, the MHC proteins, as well as how it is that T cells are prevented from attacking MHC proteins bound to fragments of their own host. When T cells do attack in this way, autoimmune diseases result. On the other hand, vaccines work by enhancing the ability of T cells to attack invaders. The study of how vaccines accomplish this should help in the design of better vaccines.
Dr. Marrack obtained her Ph. D. at the University of Cambridge, England and was a Postdoctoral Fellow there. She then held several positions in the US, including a faculty position at the University of Rochester, before joining the Department of Immunology, University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, Denver, CO, where she is now Distinguished Professor. She is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and advisory head, research in allergy/asthma at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center, Denver, CO. Her numerous honors and awards include the 2003 Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Association of Immunologists.
| Dr. Petra Reinke, Berlin, Germany |
Petra Reinke is a Professor of Nephrology at the Campus Virchow Klinikum, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, a medical director of the internal kidney transplant program and platform leader for immunology and cell therapy at the Berlin-Brandenburg Center for Regenerative Medicine. Her current research interests are cell therapy, immunopathogenesis of viral infections and allograft rejection. Prof. Reinke is a member of the International Society of Transplantation, the New York Academy of Science and the German Society of Nephrology, a co-editor of Transplant Infectious Disease and an editorial member for Transplantation. She is steering committee member of the EU network RISET. Her work in the field of transplant medicine and immunology has been widely published.
| Dr. David Sachs, Boston, USA |
David H. Sachs was born on January 10, 1942 in New York City, New York. He graduated from Harvard College in 1963, Summa Cum Laude, with an A.B. in Chemistry. In 1964 he received a Diplome d'Etudes Superieures de Sciences in organic chemistry from the University of Paris, where he studied as a Fulbright fellow. In 1968 he received an M.D., Magna Cum Laude, from Harvard Medical School. Dr. Sachs is currently the Director of the Transplantation Biology Research Center, MGH and Professor of Surgery and Immunology, HMS. His research achievements include: 1) discovery of Ia (Class II) antigens in 1973; 2) development of monoclonal anti-bodies to MHC antigens; 3) development of a unique large animal model for transplantation using miniature swine; 4) use of mixed marrow reconstitution as a means of inducing specific transplantation tolerance; and 5) studies of specific transplantation tolerance to allografts and xenografts in animal models and in the clinic. Dr. Sachs is an Editor of Transplantation and the founding Editor of Xenotransplantation. He is a Councilor of the Transplantation Society currently (2008-2012) and served previously as Councilor from 1998-2004 and Vice-President from 2004-2006. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 1996. Among his awards are the Jean Borel Award in Transplantation in 1998, the Roche Ernest Hodge Memorial Award AST Distinguished Achievement Award in 2005 and an honorary degree from the University of Nantes in 2006.
| Dr. Alberto Sanchez-Fueyo, Barcelona, Spain |
Dr. Sánchez-Fueyo received his MD from the University of Barcelona, Spain in 1993. Following a residency in gastroenterology and Hepatology at the Hospital Clinic Barcelona, he received his PhD from the University of Barcelona in 2000. From 2000 to 2004, Dr. Sánchez-Fueyo received post-doctoral training in Transplant Immunology at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, USA, in the laboratory of Dr Terry B. Strom. Since 2004 he is a faculty member at the Liver Transplant Unit at the Hospital Clinic Barcelona/IDIBAPS (University of Barcelona), and directs the Liver Trasplant Immunology Lab, which is focused on the study of the immunological aspects of human liver transplantation with an emphasis in the use of high-throughput genomic technologies. Current major lines of research are the characterization of operationally tolerant liver transplant recipients, the search for biomarkers predictive of tolerance development, and the study of anti-hepatitis C virus immune responses in liver transplant recipients. These studies have recently resulted in the discovery of several novel transcriptional biomarkers of operational tolerance in liver transplantation (reported in J Clin Invest 2008; 118(8):2845-2857). Among his additional professional responsabilities, Dr Sánchez-Fueyo is currently a member of the scientific advisory board of the Roche Organ Transplantation Research Foundation (ROTRF) and has recently been appointed Associate Editor at American Journal of Transplantation.
| Dr. Hans Schöler, Münster, Germany |
Hans Schöler was born in 1953 in Toronto, Canada, came to Germany in 1960 and grew up in Paderborn, Munich and Heidelberg. After his studies of Biology at the University of Heidelberg, Schöler conducted the research for his doctoral degree from the University of Heidelberg in 1985 at the Centre for Molecular Biology (ZMBH).
After having headed a research group for Boehringer Mannheim at the Research Center Tutzing and having worked as a staff scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistryin Göttingen, Schöler started as head of a research group at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg in 1991. In 1994, he obtained his habilitation at the Biological Faculty of the Heidelberg University.
In 1999, Hans Schöler left Germany to assume a professorship for Reproductive Physiology at the School of Veterinary Medicine University of Pennsylvania, USA. At the same time, he was director of the Center for Animal Transgenesis and Germ Cell Research at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA. From 2000 until 2004, Schöler held the Marion Dilley and David George Jones Chair for Reproductive Medicine.
Since 2004, Hans Schöler is director of the Department Cell and Developmental Biology Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine, Münster. He is professor of the Medical Faculty of the Westfälischen Wilhelms-Universität Münster and also adjunct professor of the University of Pennsylvania and the Hannover Medical School.
Schölers major research interests are the molecular biology of cells of the germline (pluripotent cells and germ cells); transcriptional regulation of genes in the mammalian germline, deciphering the molecular processes of reprogramming somatic cells after induction with transcription factors, nuclear transfer into oocytes, or fusion with pluripotent cells.
Hans Schöler, together with Irving L. Weissman and Shin’ya Yamanaka, was awarded with the Robert Koch prize in 2008.
| Dr. Doris Taylor, Minneapolis, USA |
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