International Scientific Advisory Committee (ISAC)
The International Scientific Advisory Committee (ISAC) meets once a year during a congress. The committee is chaired by the immediate Past President and includes all the chairpersons of the ISBT Working Parties together with the Secretary General and the Scientific Secretary.
Terms of Reference
Members of the International Scientific Advisory Committee
Pierre Tiberghien
President (2024-2026)
M.D., Ph.D., and clinical hematologist at the Besançon University Hospital until 2009, Pierre Tiberghien was previously director of the Bourgogne France-Comté Etablissement Français du Sang (EFS, the French transfusion public service) as well as of a University INSERM EFS research team on host-graft immune interactions. Professor of medicine, Immunology, at Franche-Comté University, Pierre Tiberghien was also EFS deputy CEO in charge of medicine and research from 2009 to 2017, and is presently senior advisor for European and international medical and scientific affairs at EFS, Paris. Pierre Tiberghien is President of the European Blood Alliance.
Jill Storry
Secretary General (2026-2030)
Jill Storry is an adjunct Professor at the Division of Haematology & Transfusion Medicine, Department of Laboratory Medicine, Lund University (LU), Sweden, and also responsible for the Immunohematology laboratories within the Department of Clinical Immunology and Transfusion Medicine, Laboratory Medicine, Lund. She trained as Medical Laboratory Technologist in Bristol, England and has worked for the American Red Cross National Immunohematology Reference Laboratory and the New York Blood Center Immunohematology Reference Laboratory before moving to Sweden to pursue her post-doctoral career. Primary areas of interest are the study of human blood group systems, both from a clinical perspective in the provision of providing blood to alloimmunised patients and from the perspective of human polymorphism, and its role in health and disease. She is currently the Immunohematology Section Editor for Vox Sanguinis. She has served ISBT as a past chair and member of the Working Party on Red Cell Immunogenetics and Blood Group Terminology as well as a member of the Working Party on Rare Donors.
Rick Kapur
Karina Yazdanbakhsh
Christian Erikstrup
ISBT President-Elect
Christian Erikstrup is Chair Professor of Clinical Immunology at Aarhus University, Consultant and Head of Blood Production at the Department of Clinical Immunology, Aarhus University Hospital, Aarhus Denmark.
Christian Erikstrup is a co-initiator of the The Danish Blood Donor Study - a nationwide open cohort study and biobank of blood donors. CE chairs the Danish Committee for Transfusion-Transmitted Infectious Diseases. CE is active in the SRAP subgroup of the TTID WP.
CE initiated his research career within HIV immunology with studies in Africa and Denmark and now focuses his research on susceptibility to infection and iron deficiency.
Angelo D’Alessandro
Denese Marks
Denese Marks earned her PhD at the University of Technology, Sydney, followed by post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Vienna, the University of Melbourne and the Institute of Child Health at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, as well as working in the biotechnology industry. Denese is the National Leader for Product Development at Australian Red Cross LifeBlood, where her research focuses on developing new blood products to meet patient needs, improving blood component processing and storage, platelet and red cell cryopreservation, pathogen inactivation and clinical trials of blood products. She is also an adjunct Associate Professor with the University of Sydney School of Medicine. Denese is a Section Editor for Vox Sanguinis, a scientific member of the Biomedical Excellence for Safer Transfusion (BEST) Collaborative and a member of the Executive Committee for the ISBT Cellular Therapies Working Party.Regional Director Western Pacific (2020-2024)
Rada M. Grubovic Rastvorceva
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Rada Milos Grubovic Rastvorceva, MD MSci PhD is Consultant in Transfusion Medicine and Hematology, Scientific Program Manager at European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines and HealthCare (EDQM) at the Council of Europe, Strasbourg, France and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Medical Sciences at Goce Delcev University, Stip, N. Macedonia. Dr. Grubovic has been President of Macedonian Society for Transfusion Medicine and Chief Medical Officer of Institute for Transfusion Medicine of RNM in Skopje, N. Macedonia. Dr. Grubovic was awarded with Princes of Wales Memorial Award by the British Blood Transfusion Society, Fulbright Scholarship by the US Department of State, Award for Scientific Contribution in the Field of Medical Sciences and Certificate of Recognition for Scientific Productivity by the Faculty of Medical Sciences, University Goce Delcev, Stip, N. Macedonia, Certificate of Recognition from Macedonian Medical Association and many other domestic and international recognitions. She has more than 20 years working experience in the transfusion medicine field and extensive research experience in blood donation, apheresis, blood safety and supply, cellular therapy, transplantation medicine, clinical transfusion, quality management and etc. She gained additional research experience at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), USA and King’s College Hospital, London, UK. She was National Project Manager of the EU IPA project “Strengthening of the Blood Safety System” 2013/14 and collaborator of European Blood Alliance (EBA) at EU projects SUPPORT-E and SUPPLY. Dr. Grubovic was a national representative in European Committee on Blood Transfusion at EDQM, Council of Europe and in European Commission on SoHO (bilateral screening chapter 28) and institutional representative and board member of EBA. She was advisor of Macedonian Minister of Health 2012-2015 and was a founder and Project Leader of National COVID-19 convalescent plasma program (PI – trial NCT04397523). She participated in numerous research projects and authored and coauthored more than 250 scientific publications. Dr. Grubovic is a member of ISBT, AABB, ISCT, MMA, MMC, MSTM and editorial board member and reviewer in more than 20 international medical journals.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/radicagrubovic/
email: [email protected]
Reinhard Henschler
Richard R. Gammon
Dr. Richard Gammon is the Medical Director of Transfusion Medicine and the Blood Bank at Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute in Tampa, Florida. He received his medical degree at Drexel University. He completed residency training in Clinical Pathology at The Ohio State University and fellowship training in Blood Banking and Transfusion Medicine at the University of Virginia Medical Center. Dr. Gammon has board certifications in Clinical Pathology as well as Blood Banking and Transfusion Medicine. He is a member of the faculty of the University of Central Florida College of Medicine faculty and the University of South Florida. Dr. Gammon is active in AABB, ISBT as the Clinical Transfusion Working Party chair and the President of the South Central Association of Blood Banks.
Rachel Thorpe
Rachel Thorpe, PhD, is a sociologist and Senior Research Fellow at Australian Red Cross Lifeblood and Honorary Fellow in the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne. Rachel’s background is sociology of health. She uses social theories to investigate donation and donors within the context of their lives, social systems and changing technologies. A key focus of her current research is examining barriers and enablers to donation for older people, and donor perspectives on the use of genomic technologies in transfusion medicine.
https://www.lifeblood.com.au/our-research/program/meet-our-researchers/dr-rachel-thorpe
Jay Epstein
Gopal Patidar
Nicole Thornton
Karen Moniz
Karen Moniz, MHA, MT(ASCP)SBB, has been the Technical Director at ICCBBA, Inc, since 2020.
Karen is responsible for leading the technical development of the ISBT 128 Standard to meet the changing traceability, labeling, and coding needs for medical products of human origin (MPHO). She studied medical technology at the University of Kentucky, specialized in immunohematology at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and studied healthcare administration at George Washington University. Karen has decades of management experience in the management of blood donor centers, transfusion services, and biomedical information technology. She was an early advocate for the implementation of the ISBT 128 Standard and remains enthusiastic about the future of the Standard to contribute to MPHO traceability, biovigilance, and electronic data transfer in addition to supporting ongoing harmonization of terminology in all sectors of medical products of human origin.
Maria Therese Ahlen
Maria Therese Ahlen, PhD, is a Researcher at the Norwegian National Unit for Platelet Immunology, Department of Laboratory Medicine at the University Hospital North Norway in Tromsø, Norway, and an Associate Professor in the Immunology Research Group at Department of Medical Biology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway.
Maria's research interest is in platelet immunology and particularly alloimmune responses. The primary focus has been Fetal/Neonatal alloimmune thrombocytopenia, with studies on maternal antigen-specific T cells, antigen presentation and prevention of immunization in preclinical models. Ahlen is also engaged in the clinical lab investigations of other immune-mediated platelet disorders leading to thrombocytopenia and/or thrombosis, as well as research on these conditions.
Petter Höglund
Nigar Ertuğrul Örüç
Vered Yahalom
Margaret A. Keller
Dr. Keller is the Executive of National Laboratories at the American Red Cross, overseeing the National Molecular Laboratory, National Reference Laboratory for Specialized Testing, and the National Neutrophil. She is senior director of the American Rare Donor Program (ARDP). Margaret received her PhD in molecular genetics from the University of Pennsylvania. She is ARDP liaison to the Molecular Testing Standards Unit of the AABB and the secretary of the ISBT Working Party on Red Cell Immunogenetics and Blood Group Terminology and a member of the ISBT Working Party on Rare Donors. She is adjunct Associate Professor at Thomas Jefferson University, is editor-in-chief of the journal Immunohematology and is on the board of South Central Association of Blood Banks.
Brian Custer
