We are delighted to announce our 2025 invited speakers
Michael Bonadonna
Corina Brussaard
Desiree Kunkel
Virginia Litwin
Estefanía Lozano Andres
Lola Martinez
Lena Müller
Peter O'Toole
Ziv Porat
Edwin van der Pol
Gijsbert Willigen
We are delighted to announce our 2025 invited speakers
Prof. Dr. Corina Brussaard is a Senior Research Team Leader at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ), and was leading the Microbiology Unit the last 10 years. She is since 2013 Professor of Viral Ecology at UvA, and since 2016 a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.
She pioneered the use of flow cytometry for high-throughput detection and enumeration of aquatic viruses. Her research demonstrates quantitative importance of viruses as mortality agents for marine microorganisms, including the unicellular algae (named phytoplankton), and highlights viruses as driving forces of marine microbial host population dynamics and biogeochemical cycling. As biological oceanographer and microbial ecologist she combines process-oriented viral ecology field research with mechanistic experimental investigations.
Corina has (co-)authored >165 publications, has been chief scientist on numerous cruises (😉), and serves/served the scientific community as editor (e.g. FEMS Microbiology Reviews), meeting organizer (e.g. 2022-GRC Marine Microbes), president of ISVM (International Society for Viruses of Microbes), Secretary of SCOR (Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research), Science Advisory Committee member for the Dutch Research Council (NWO), intiated the Netherlands Association of Virus Ecology (NAVE), and became recently board member of Division Virology of the Netherlands Society for Microbiology (KNVM).
Virginia Litwin is a thought-leader in validation and standardization focusing on “Cytometry from Bench-to-Bedside” .
She is currently the President-Elect of the International Society of the Advancement of Cytometry (ISAC). In 2023, she received the International Clinical Cytometry Society (ICCS) Wallace H. Coulter Award in recognition of her contributions to Clinical Cytometry.
She is a member of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Flow Cytometry Standards Consortium and has been an invited speaker at FDA/NIST several times.
Virginia serves on the Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) Expert Panel and is the Documents Development Committee chair the CLSI guidance documents on Validation (H62 1st Edition) and Immunophenotyping (H42 3rd Edition). She is an Editor for Cytometry Part B and has been a guest editor for special issues addressing translational cytometry. She founded the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) Flow Cytometry Committee.
After obtaining a Ph.D. in Virology/Immunology from the University of Iowa, Virginia joined Lewis Lanier at DNAX as a post-doctoral fellow where she identified the KIR receptor, CD158E1. She was a biomarker scientist at Bristol-Myers Squibb and is currently a Director of Scientific Affairs at Eurofins Clinical Trial Solutions.
Estefanía Lozano Andrés is an Assistant Professor at Utrecht University. She earned her PhD as part of the European TRAIN-EV consortium (MSCA-ITN), where she specialized in the characterization of nanoparticles and extracellular vesicles (EVs) at the single-particle level, with a focus on high-sensitivity flow cytometry.
Currently, Estefanía leads the Centre for Flow Cytometry, contributes to national and international initiatives, and collaborates on a wide range of translational research projects supervising researchers. In addition, she is an active member of international societies, such as ISEV and ISAC, and has been recognized as an Emerging Leader within the ISAC Leadership Development Program.
Her research interest is focused on unraveling the biomolecular cargo of EVs and defining EV subsets in body fluids, with the goal of advancing biomarker profiling applications. Estefanía is deeply passionate about education and is committed to advancing cytometry technologies to address complex biomedical challenges.
Peter heads the Imaging and Cytometry Labs within the Technology Facility at the University of York which includes an array of confocal microscopes, flow cytometers and electron microscopes. Peter gained his PhD in the Cell Biophysics Laboratory at the University of Essex and has been involved in many aspects of fluorescence imaging. Research is currently focused on both technology and method development of novel probes and imaging modalities.
Peter has ongoing collaborations with many leading microscopy and cytometry companies and his group also provides research support to many academics and commercial organisations. Peter is also heavily involved with teaching microscopy and flow cytometry which includes organising and teaching on both the RMS Light Microscopy Summer School and the RMS Practical Flow Cytometry courses.
