Virginia Litwin

President of the International Society of the Advancement of Cytometry

Virginia Litwin is a thought-leader in validation and standardization for flow cytometry. Bringing “Cytometry from Bench-to-Bedside” has been the focus of her professional activities since 1999 when she started working in translational medicine at Bristol-Myers Squibb. 

Currently, Virginia is the President 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 the science, education and practice of Clinical Cytometry.

Virginia is a member of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Flow Cytometry Standards Consortium. She was a councilor for the International Clinical Cytometry Society (ICCS) and now servers on the ICCS Advocacy Committee whose mission is to interface with regulatory agencies. She has been an invited speaker at FDA/NIST on many occasions.

She co-founded the Flow Cytometry Community within the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS). This group published the first papers on flow cytometry method and instrument validation. Since 2021, she has been an member of  the Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) Expert Panel on Hematology and Immunology and Ligand Assay and is the Documents Development Committee Chair  holder for the CLSI guidance documents on Validation (H62 1^st Edition) and Immunophenotyping (H42 3^rd Edition).

Virginia is the co-editor of the first and second editions of Flow Cytometry in Drug Discovery and Development (Wiley-Blackwell). She is an Associate Editor for Cytometry Part B: Clinical Cytometry and has been a guest editor for special issues addressing translational cytometry. JIM- Flow Cytometry Biomarkers and Translational Medicine (2011); Cytometry Part B- Receptor Occupancy (2015); Cytometry Part B- Cytometry Advancing Next Generation Drug Development (2021).

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 has held leadership roles in several contract research organizations. Recently she founded Translation Cytometry Advisors.