simply blood

Dear ISEH Friends and Colleagues,

This is my final president’s message before I will be stepping down at the end of the ISEH Annual Meeting in August in Brisbane. It has been a real privilege to work on your behalf, with invaluable support from enthusiastic volunteers from right across the globe as well as our dedicated team at SmithBucklin in Chicago. We are fortunate to see exciting breakthroughs in our field on an almost weekly basis, where ground-breaking discoveries in basic research go hand-in-hand with the development of exciting new therapies. Such breakthroughs critically depend on a vibrant research community, and I believe that we can all be proud of the important contributions that the ISEH has made over the last nearly 50 years to foster exactly this.

I am happy to provide you all with an update on the developing partnership between ISEH and the European Hematology Association (EHA). Over 12,000 delegates attended the annual EHA meeting in June in Amsterdam, which in…

For the first time since 2010, the ISEH scientific community will gather Down Under for the Annual Meeting – an incredible opportunity to discover local talent in the field of hematology but also to explore everything this incredible continent nation has to offer! Australia’s health and medical research industry is amongst one of the most productive in the world, generating nearly 4% of global output despite Australians only representing about 0.32% of the world’s population. In accordance with Australia’s reputation, Brisbane is standing as an internationally significant centre for world-class translational research in hematology. In this collaborative environment, the ISEH Annual Meeting represents the ideal opportunity to bond with Australian medical researchers in the field of hematology and develop a productive network of collaborators from across the world.

This year, the ISEH Annual Meeting will take place in Brisbane, the capital of the Australian state of Queensland. With a s…

Even in the era of open access and non-traditional forms of communication like social media, publication of research findings in peer-reviewed scientific journals remains the major way of disseminating our findings to the broader research community.  As such, appropriate peer-review is crucial for the critical review of new data before the findings are presented to the scientific public.  It seems simple enough right?  All of us read papers and think about what the results mean for our wok and for the field.  But we all have our own opinions about what makes a paper really exceptional.  When I read a paper I always think about why the authors chose to do a certain experiment a particular way, or why they didn’t follow up on this finding more.  So we all have an internal monologue, which serves as our own peer-review.  The people called upon by journals to review manuscripts essentially serve as gate-keepers to ensure rigorous and careful interpretation before the data are made public…

Every year at the ISEH meeting, the New Investigator Committee (NIC) invites one speaker to present in the New Investigator Award Session. For this year’s meeting in Brisbane, we have invited Marella de Bruijn PhD, Professor of Developmental Haematopoiesis at the University of Oxford. Marella completed her PhD at the University of Rotterdam in 1997 and went on to do postdoctoral training with Profs. Elaine Dzierzak and Nancy Speck, In 2003, Marella started her own lab at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine at Oxford, where she has focused on understanding the genetic regulation of developmental blood formation. Besides running her research laboratory, Marella has been heavily involved in training and mentorship at Oxford and within ISEH, and is this year’s organizer of the ISEH pre-meeting workshop. In preparation for her invited talk at ISEH, we caught up with Marella to find out more about her interests and her science.

Q&A with Marella de Bruijn:
Q1. How would you desc…