The Young Professionals Council fosters ambition and builds community among young professionals who are starting their career in transfusion medicine.
The ISBT Young Professionals Council (YPC) is a group of young leaders in the blood transfusion community with a mission of increase existing opportunities for this younger audience and stimulate active participation in the educational events offered by ISBT.
The Council meets annually in person at the ISBT international or Regional congress, and virtually on a regular basis throughout the year. Furthermore they will maintain communication with the ISBT Board, the Standing Committee of the ISBT Academy and the ISBT Central Office, to ensure that the needs of the young professionals’ community are met. It also aims to influence the strategic direction of ISBT in relation to young professionals and their career development.
ISBT promotes this by educational activities, networking events, leadership opportunities, and engaging young professionals to develop programs and opportunities to support young leaders in the field of transfusion medicine.
Meet ISBT's Young Professionals Council members
Poojan Joshi
Poojan Joshi is a research assistant at Canadian Blood Services and a Master’s candidate in applied social psychology at the University of Guelph. Under the mentorship of Drs. Jennie Haw and Kelly Holloway, she is developing expertise in donation studies and qualitative methodologies.
Poojan has contributed to several donation-focused projects, including Addressing Systemic Barriers to Donation for South Asian Communities and Genetic Sequencing of Blood Donors: Donors’ Views. Poojan is passionate about raising awareness of the importance of social science in transfusion medicine, fostering international knowledge-sharing collaborations, and addressing global challenges and inequities in blood donation.
Cvetanka Kochovska
Cvetanka Kochovska is a medical doctor who graduated in 2017 from the University of "Goce Delcev" in Shtip, Republic of North Macedonia, where she is continuing with her professional development in 2021 as a resident of transfusion medicine under the mentorship of Prof. dr. Rada M. Grubovic Rastvorceva.
Cvetanka has former working experience as a lecturer in a secondary nursing school, and from 2019 and on, she is working as a MD at the Institute of Transfusion Medicine in Skopje, Republic of North Macedonia. In parallel, she is an active volunteer for multiple NGOs, including the Red Cross of North Macedonia.
In 2023, she was accepted as a mentee of the I TRY IT program by ISBT.
Her research fields of interest are: blood donors and donation, immunohematology and clinical transfusion. She shows professional interest in the field of quality control with her active presence in training courses for quality control management in the blood bank.
Zainab Harb
Zainab is an American board certified clinical and anatomic pathologist based in Bahrain. She is currently finishing her fellowship in blood banking and transfusion medicine in the United States. She obtained her medical degree from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland - Medical University of Bahrain. She is interested in Cellular Therapies, Therapeutic Apheresis and Hemotherapy. She is an active member of many pathology societies including Association for the Advancements of Blood and Biotherapies (AABB), College of American Pathologists (CAP), American Society of Clinical Pathology (ASCP), American Society for Apheresis (ASFA), United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology (USCAP) and European Society of Pathology (ESP). She is actively involved in research and academics and is very passionate about teaching pathology to medical students, residents as well as laboratory technicians.
Abiy Belay Ambaye
Abiy graduated with a BSc in Medical Laboratory technology in 2008 from Addis Ababa University. He completed his Master of Science degree in Clinical Laboratory Science with a speciality in Laboratory Management and Quality Assurance from Addis Ababa University in 2017. He is currently pursuing his Master of Science in Public Health.
Abiy is interested in promoting voluntary blood donation, and equitable access to safe blood. He is engaged in initiatives to strengthen the quality management system across the transfusion chain; introduction of advanced technologies into the country, implementation of IT systems in blood banks and supports the monitoring and evaluation system for the service. He is interested in conducting research related to blood transfusion and laboratory medicine. He is also keen to contribute to the introduction and availability of different cellular therapies and PDMPs in Ethiopia and has completed the AABB Cellular Therapies Certificate Program provided in Partnership with George Washington University.
Amira Badawy
Dr Amira Badawy is a Lecturer of Clinical Pathology at the Faculty of Medicine, Menofia University, Egypt, with a main focus in transfusion medicine and hematopathology. Her research focuses on the optimization of platelet storage, transfusion safety, therapeutic apheresis, and advancing transfusion practices in low-resource settings. She recently presented her PhD work on cold-stored platelets with additive solutions at the ISBT Congress in Milan and was awarded the Harold Gunson Fellowship.
Jannison Karlly Cavalcante Ribeiro
Jannison Ribeiro is a Biomedical Scientist who graduated from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN) in 2008 with a Master’s degree in biochemistry and molecular biology. He obtained his PhD in Health Biotechnology at Universidade Estadual do Ceará (UECE) in 2019. Jannison Ribeiro is also a specialist in Clinical Hematology, 2014 and Clinical Pathology 2019. Currently, he develops postgraduate activities in Hemotherapy and MBA in Health Service Management. Jannison is a professor at UECE and is the coordinator of advanced research in hematology and hemotherapy at Hemoce. He is interested in studying tissue bioengineering, gene therapy, CART cell therapy, complementary molecular diagnosis applied to hematological diseases and Patient Blood Management.
Paula Janica M. Montañano
Paula Janica M. Montañano is a Science Research Specialist at the Department of Health’s Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM), working within the Pathology Department’s Transfusion Transmissible Infections–National Reference Laboratory in the Philippines. Her role focuses on ensuring the safety of blood transfusions through confirmatory testing for transfusion-transmissible infections (TTIs). She also facilitates HIV and TTI proficiency training, supports the External Quality Assessment Scheme, and conducts research. Passionate about advancing blood safety, Paula is dedicated to improving research and practices that enhance the quality and safety of blood donations.
Maria Roussakis
Maria graduated with a Bachelor of Health Science in Medical Laboratory Science from the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, and a Master of Science in Health Science Education from McMaster University. She has worked in clinical laboratories in both Canada and Australia. She currently works as a Lecturer in Transfusion Science and Haematology within the Medical Laboratory Science program at the University of Southern Queensland. Maria is passionate about improving clinical transfusion practice as a member of the Australian & New Zealand Society of Blood Transfusion (ANZSBT) Clinical Transfusion Practice committee. She is also engaged in several Working Parties within the ISBT, and is committed to advancing the field through education and practice.
Tayler Van Denakker
Tayler is a board-certified transfusion medicine physician and hematopathologist based in New York, USA. After completing medical school, she specialized in pathology, completing subspecialty fellowship training in hematopathology at Weill-Cornell Medical Center in 2021 and in transfusion medicine at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in 2022. She currently holds a position as assistant professor at The Mount Sinai Hospital. Her interest in transfusion medicine stems from its significant clinical impact on diverse patient populations, particularly through blood transfusion and cellular therapy. Tayler’s clinical and research focus centers on the management of sickle cell disease with an interest in the role of cellular and gene therapies. She is also deeply committed to advancing blood safety through hemovigilance, with a goal of ensuring equitable access to safe blood, globally. Driven by a deep passion for connecting people, Tayler strives to empower individuals and teams by fostering collaboration and creating opportunities for growth and improvement within the field of transfusion medicine. Outside of medicine, Tayler has a passion for adventure. She loves to travel and explore new destinations, cultures, and languages. She also enjoys spending time outdoors – hiking and running allows her to stay connected with nature. Although, when she isn’t on the move, she finds balance and solace in a good book.
Kriti Batni
Suhasini Sil
Previous members of the Council
Cécile Toly Ndour
John-Paul Tung
Saikat Mandal
Dr. Saikat Mandal is currently working as an Attending Consultant at Department of Transfusion Medicine & Transplant Immunology at Jaypee Hospital, Noida, India. He obtained MBBS from Institute of Post Graduate Medical Education & Research, Kolkata, and MD - Transfusion Medicine from All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Rishikesh, India. He is interested in Therapeutic Apheresis, Patient blood management, Transplant immunology and Immunohematology. He is actively involved in research and academics in this field, holding authorship in multiple articles published in peer-reviewed journals. He is passionate about connecting people.
Nour Al-Mozain
Nour is Haematopatgology and Transfusion Medicine Physician at King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Center. Her passion for transfusion medicine started by realizing the profound interaction between basic science, laboratory medicine, and clinical practice.
It is an opportunity to learn a new thing every day. You are not only required to identify what went right and what went wrong. However, you will constantly be stimulated to determine further what could be done better and forecast a better practice for the future. Adding to all of that, the are not many doctors around the world who are encouraged to have this as a specialty, so she decided to have it as her career to provide patient care uniquely and differently. Besides, she is a big advocate for this specialty among the younger generation.
Eunike (Nysa) McGowan
Eunike (Nysa) McGowan has a broad research interest in the RhD blood group antigen. Nysa has investigated its genetic diversity and the immune pathways which can lead to the production of anti-D antibodies. She has recently finished the PhD program at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, University of Queensland. Nysa received the Harold Gunson Fellowship in 2017. This enabled her to present in the “Best Abstracts” session at 28th Regional Congress of the ISBT in Guangzhou. Nysa is now looking forward to be involved in blood group genomics research in her current role as Senior Research Assistant at the Australian Red Cross Lifeblood.
Nysa was the West Pacific Representative and also the Chair of ISBT's Young Professionals Council (YPC) in 2024.
- Email:
- [email protected]
Jian (Nikita) Ou-Yang
Jian Ou-Yan has been working as a blood donor recruiter and a researcher at Guangzhou Blood Center, China, since 2008. Her research field focuses on the blood donor retention and recruitment, blood donation propagandizes, and policymaking. She directed my endeavors toward the research of blood donor retention and recruitment as a Leader of Blood Donor research team in her department. She turned her research achievements into manuscripts and have published 5 papers in 3 different peer-reviewed journals since 2017. She applied her research achievements to retention and recruitment strategies for promoting blood donation.
She have been participating in the modifications of two important regulations in Guangzhou, China (Regulations of Guangzhou on the Administration of Blood Donation, Measures of Guangzhou on the Administration of Using Blood Free) since 2019.
- Email:
- [email protected]
Antoine Lewin
Antoine is an early-career researcher who completed a PhD in Epidemiology and Biostatistics in 2015 at the Pierre and Marie Curie University. From 2015 to 2017, he was a postdoctoral fellow in Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Sherbrooke, and in Biostatistics at Sainte-Justine Hospital in Montreal.
Since May 2017, Antoine is Chief Epidemiology, Surveillance and Biological Risk Management at Héma-Québec, a provincial blood supplier in the province of Québec, Canada. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Sherbrooke. His roles are to conduct epidemiological and populational health studies in transfusion medicine and infectious diseases. As part of his role at Héma-Québec, he is also in charge of the statistical and methodological consultation service and the surveillance of emerging pathogens.
Given his experience mentoring and training younger scientists, Antoine is dedicated to promote ISBT’s educational missions.
Syeldy Langi Sasongko
Syeldy obtained her Research Master’s in Global Health at Vrije University, Amsterdam in 2017 and began working at Sanquin, the Dutch national blood bank, shortly thereafter. Syeldy is a qualitative and mixed-methods researcher and completed her PhD at Sanquin studying how blood banks change during times of uncertainty. She has participated in a BEST collaborative project on immunoglobulins and worked for the European Hematology Association in the SUPPLY project Work Package 6. She was the former European representative of the ISBT Young Professionals Council (YPC), chair from 2022-2023, and loves helping the young professionals community.
Lilian Antwi Boateng
Lilian is a trained Biomedical Scientist based at the Department of Medical Diagnostics, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana, where she researches and teaches haematology and immunohaematology. She obtained her Bachelors and masters degree, all in Biomedical sciences from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana and the University of Westminster, United Kingdom, respectively. She also undertook a six months residency programme in blood banking at the University of Michigan and the University of Michigan blood bank reference laboratory where she obtained a fellow of the University of Michigan African Presidential scholars programme (UMAPS). She is currently pursuing a PhD in blood transfusion with the International Public Health Department of the Liverpool school of Tropical Medicine, United Kingdom. Her PhD is focused on optimising blood transfusion practices in sickle cell disease patients in Sub Saharan Africa.
Lilian has been the recipient of three scholarships; KNUST-UOW Bespoke scholarship, UMAPS scholarship and Commonwealth scholarship. Since the beginning of her career as a researcher, she has won three research grants, the DANIDA Building stronger university seed grant, Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) seed grant and the STEM supplementary grant. All research grants were channelled into advancing blood transfusion medicine in Ghana in the area of red blood cell antigens and alloantibodies.
Lilian is passionate about promoting blood transfusion research in Africa and imparting good laboratory transfusion practices to students pursing laboratory training in blood transfusion.
Carla Luana Dinardo
Carla Dinardo graduated in Medicine at University of São Paulo Medical School in 2006. She is a specialist in Hematology and Hemotherapy since 2010, and became PhD in Sciences in 2015. She initiated her career at Fundação Pró-Sangue São Paulo Hemocenter as head of the Immunohematology Division. Currently, she is director of external relations of Fundação Pró-Sangue, coordinating the transfusion and the immunohematology reference laboratories. She is also head of the scientific department of the Hemotherapy Unit of Hospital Samaritano. Carla is especially interested in studying the genetics of blood group systems and red blood cell alloimmunization. She is an active investigator of the Recipient Epidemiology and Donor Evaluation Study (REDS) IV-P and of the Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed) Consortium.
- Email:
- [email protected]
- LinkedIn:
- https://linkedin.com/in/carla-luana-dinardo-8125b326/
Tyler Hutchinson
Representing the Americas region
Tyler Hutchinson is from the United States and specializes in blood group and hemoglobinopathy genotyping. He graduated from Rutgers University with a B.A. in Genetics and from Johns Hopkins University with an M.S. in Biotechnology. He has made many contributions to the transfusion community in identifying polymorphisms affecting antigen expression and has been integral in bringing several diagnostic tests to market. Tyler is currently a Senior Development Scientist with Immucor’s molecular division and is responsible for product support, data analytics, and new product development.
- Email:
- [email protected]
Arwa Al Riyami
Senior Consultant Hematopathologist at Department of Hematology, Sultan Qaboos University Hospital.
- Email:
- [email protected]
Satyam Arora
ISBT Regional Director South East Asia, Additional Professor, Transfusion Medicine, Post Graduate Institute of Child Health (PGICH), Noida, India
Dr Satyam Arora, MBBS, MD (Transfusion Medicine), CABP (AABB) completed his MD in 2012 from the prestigious Post Graduate Institute Medical Education and Research (PGIMER), Chandigarh, India. He established a pediatric transfusion-focused academic transfusion medicine department at a stand-alone children’s hospital (under the Government) in India and currently working there as an additional professor. He is presently working to establish a dedicated pediatric hematopoietic stem cell transplant and cell therapy centre at the same institute.
He has done various international rotations (observerships) in hematopoietic stem cell transplants (Cleveland Clinic, USA) and Cell Therapy (Centre for Cell and Gene Therapy, Baylor Medical Center, USA). He is a member of the Technical Resource Group (TRG) on blood transfusion services (BTS) under the Directorate General Health Services under the Government of India and an expert member of India's National Donor Vigilance Program. He has been a member of ISBT since 2012 and was a founder member, past chairperson and South-East Asia representative with the Young Professional Council (YPC) of ISBT. Presently he is secretary of the Clinical Transfusion Working Party, co-chair of the Pediatric Transfusions subgroup of ISBT and member of the Hemovigilance Working Party. He is the recipient of many prestigious awards such as “Dr Harold Gunson” Fellowship (2012), the ISBT TTID Working Party Travel Award for Young Scientists (2014), “Young Scientist Award” by the Indian Society of Transfusion Medicine 2021and “Narendra S Bagaria Award” by the Indian Society of Blood Transfusion and Immunohematology (2022). His areas of interest are pediatric transfusions, hematopoietic stem cell transplants, apheresis science and hemovigilance.
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Sophie Uyoga
Sophie Uyoga is a research scientist at the KEMRI Wellcome Trust Research Programme in Kilifi, Kenya. She has over 19 years’ research experience in describing the epidemiology of red cell genetic disorders with focus on Sickle cell anemia (SCA). Blood transfusion is one of the key management strategies for management of anemia and acute crises in people living with sickle cell anemia. Her current area of research focuses on understanding the transfusion needs of children with sickle cell anemia and the need for better transfusion strategies so that the transfusions don’t result in the development of alloimmunisation that could result in re-admissions with anemia.
Yanli Ji
Regional Director Western Pacific
Yanli Ji start to work in the Institute of Clinical Blood Transfusion in Guangzhou Blood Center since she got the PhD degree in 2008 from Sun Yat-Sen University in China till now. From 2010 to 2011, she worked as a visiting scholar in Sanquin Research. Her interests are the research of RBC blood group genotyping and its application in the Chinese population, rare donor program, blood group reference testing, and clinical consults. The routine Asian-type DEL testing was firstly carried out in their lab to avoid anti-D prophylaxis in Asian-type DEL pregnant women in China. She was a member of the first ISBT young professional council. Now she is a member of ISBT working party of Red Cell Immunogenetics and Blood Group Terminology, and the vice director of immunohematology Committee of CSBT (Chinese Society of Blood Transfusion).
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