Nirav Shah, MD, MSHP, is Associate Professor of Medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin, Division of Hematology and Oncology, specializing in lymphoma, CAR-T cell therapy, and stem cell transplant at Froedtert Hospital. He graduated with honors and Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Society membership from the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine in 2008. He then completed his Internal Medicine residency at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts in 2011.

Post-residency, he took a position at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Hospitalist medicine before proceeding to the University of Pennsylvania where he completed both hematology/oncology fellowship and a Master’s degree in Health Policy research in 2015. His research focus is in the area of novel agents and cell therapy development for hematological malignancies. He is currently Director of the Bone Marrow Transplant and Cellular Therapy Program at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Jonathan W. Friedberg, M.D., is Samuel Durand Professor of Medicine at the University of Rochester, and Director of the James P. Wilmot Cancer Institute. Dr Friedberg received his medical degree from Harvard Medical School. His postgraduate training included an internship and residency at Massachusetts General Hospital.

He also completed a medical oncology and hematology fellowship at Dana-Farber/Partners Cancer Care in Boston. Dr Friedberg also has an M.M.Sc. degree from Harvard Medical School in clinical investigation. His research interests focus on development of novel therapies for patients with lymphoma. He is chair of the lymphoma committee in the SWOG NCTN group, and serves Editor-in-Chief at Journal of Clinical Oncology. He was awarded the Scholar in Clinical Research award from the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, is a funded investigator from NCI, and has chaired the education program of the American Society of Hematology annual meeting.

Stefan Dirnhofer is currently Deputy Director of the Institute of Pathology at the University Hospital Basel, Switzerland.

He is past President of the European Association for Hematopathology (EAHP) and heads the Swiss reference center for lymphoma pathology of the Swiss Cancer Institute (formerly SAKK).



As such, he is responsible for the central pathology review of all lymphoma study patients of the Swiss Cancer Institute. His research focuses on the pathophysiology of lymphomas and the identification of diagnostic, prognostic, and predictive biomarkers. In recent years, his research group has made significant contributions to the genetic characterization of marginal zone lymphomas (MZL) and post-transplant-associated lymphoproliferations (PTLD). Stefan Dirnhofer has numerous national and international collaborations and over 350 publications in peer reviewed journals.

Andrew Davies is Professor of Haematological Oncology in the Cancer Sciences Unit in the Faculty of Medicine, University Hospital Southampton. He completed his training in Medical Oncology at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, and as a Cancer Research UK clinical fellow he undertook a PhD examining the molecular mechanisms underlying transformation of follicular lymphoma to more aggressive histological sub-types. Prof. Davies specialises in the treatment of malignant lymphoma.

He has a particular interest in the investigation of novel therapeutics applied to lymphoma. He has extensive experience in early phase trials, including leading first in man lymphoma studies all the way through to leading late phase studies. He also undertakes research activity in early diagnosis of cancer. He is Chair of the UK Lymphoma Research Network. He is Director of the Cancer Research UK/National Institute of Health Southampton Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre. He is also the Wessex regional lead for cancers in Teenagers and Young Adults (TYA).



Sirpa Leppä is a professor of Oncology, a group leader in the Applied Tumor Genomics Research Program at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and a chief physician at the Helsinki University Hospital Comprehensive Cancer Center. Her primary research interests include developing and optimizing therapies for lymphomas and identifying biologically relevant prognostic and predictive factors.

She conducts academic and company-sponsored clinical trials, as well as basic and translational research projects, and currently supervises ten PhD students. She is the current chair of the Nordic Lymphoma Group, a member of the European Hematology Association (EHA) Board, a faculty member of the EHA Clinical Research Training in Hematology (CRTH) Program, and a member of the EHA Scientific Program Committee