Paul K. Wallace, PhD is currently the Chief Scientific Officer of SciGro, Inc and Professor Emeritus at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center RPCCC) in Buffalo, NY. He served from 2003-2021 as Director of the Flow and Image Cytometry Department. He is a Past President of the International Society for Advancement of Cytometry an organization with over 2,000 members, active in the International Clinical Cytometry Society, an Associate Editor of Clinical Cytometry B, and the 2018 recipient of their Wallace H. Coulter award for lifetime achievement in clinical cytometry.

The Flow and Image Cytometry Department at Roswell Park combined both clinical and research missions at the Institute. The clinical laboratory under his leadership implemented measurable (formerly known as minimal) residual disease (MRD) testing for AML, B-ALL, multiple myeloma and CLL. The laboratory served as a core reference facility performing immunophenotyping and immune monitoring studies on samples from patients enrolled in clinical trials for biotech and NIH funded studies. His lifetime research focus is on myeloid cell biology, and he is currently working on several projects designed to develop and analyze MRD in patients with acute myeloid leukemia.

Before joining Roswell Park, Dr. Wallace was an Assistant Professor of Immunology at Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover NH (1993-2003), a cofounder of Zynaxis Cell Science, Inc., Malvern PA (1988-1991), and the Supervisor of Flow Cytometry at SmithKline (now Quest) Clinical Laboratories King of Prussia, PA (SKCL; 1979-1988). He is internationally recognized for his commitment to flow cytometric education and is a founding member of ISAC’s Educational Task Force/Committee and of the ICCS Education committee. He has been on the faculty of the Bowdoin/New Mexico/Madison Annual Course in Methods and Applications of Cytometry since 1994.

Dagna Sheerar is the manager of the University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center Flow Cytometry Laboratory.  Dagna’s favorite flow cytometry activities include designing high-parameter immunophenotyping panels, analyzing data (both flow and facility usage data), training and educating new cytometrists, consulting with researchers about their cytometry assays and data analysis work flows, rigor and reproducibility, evaluating, procuring, and installing fancy new cytometry instruments, and procrastinating on the monthly Flow Lab billing by discussing the theory of anything remotely related to flow cytometry with anyone who will listen.  

Dagna has been working in and managing Flow Cytometry Shared Resource Laboratories since 2000, both at the University of Wisconsin and at the University of Western Ontario.  She is a Certified Cytometrist actively involved in the Great Lakes International Imaging and Flow Cytometry Association and the International Society for the Advancement of Cytometry and serves on the Board of Cytometry Educational Associates, Inc., as Vice President.  Dagna has been involved in hosting and teaching at the Annual Course since 2019. 

Dagna’s non-Flow hobbies include gardening (indoors and outdoors), hiking with her friends and dogs, knitting, and (begrudgingly) home improvement. 

Rui Gardner, PhD, is currently Head of Flow Cytometry Core Facility at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Passionate about Science and Technology, Rui has an interdisciplinary background in Mathematics, Physics, and Biology that allows bridging the gap between the operational and technical details in flow cytometry and the science within flow applications. Currently Rui is the Flow Cytometry Core Head at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and previously was the Core manager at the Gulbenkian Institute of Science in Portugal. Driven by a sense of responsibility towards his peers and the flow cytometry community, Rui has been actively involved in ISAC, on the Core Managers Task Force, elected to the ISAC Council, chairing the SRL Oversight Committee, and helped to establish several Shared Resource Lab programs and activities, including the Live Education Delivery Task Force, Meetings Committee and the Leadership Development Committee. Rui is also a member of FlowCytometryUK, member and past councilor of the Sociedad Iberica de Citometria (SIC), and current member of the FlowTex Cytometry board. Rui continues to be active in mentorship of others in Flow Cytometry and Core Facility management. Rui earned a B.S in Biochemistry from University of Lisbon, Portugal, and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Porto, Portugal. His postdoctoral work focused on evaluating immune diversity estimation techniques.

John received a Ph.D. from Drexel University in Biomedical Engineering, with a focus on machine learning applied to single cell data.  He has worked for FlowJo, now BD Bioinformatics, ever since.  His role is Director of Science and Product Development, with responsibilities that include product ownership, research and design for new software tools, evangelizing cytometry, and fostering scientific collaborations intended to further our field.  John has been an ISAC member since 2006.

Dr. Aja Rieger is the Flow Cytometry Core manager at the University of Alberta, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry. She was honored as an ISAC Emerging Leader (2017-2021) and is an active member of the ISAC SRL Services Committee and the Flow Cytometry Content Task Force. She is also Co-President of the Canadian Cytometry and Microscopy Association.

Dr. Rieger holds an MSc in Immunology and Microbiology from McGill University, with a specialization in neuroimmunology, and a PhD in Cell and Developmental Biology from the University of Alberta, with a specialization in comparative immunology. After her PhD, she pursued a post-doctoral fellowship at University of California-Berkeley in Neuroimmunology. She then moved back to Edmonton to manage the flow cytometry facility at the University of Alberta. Her recent research has been focused on developing imaging flow cytometry tools to study the interactions between cells and pathogens.

Joanne Lannigan, M.S. is the CEO of Flow Cytometry Support Services, LLC, a flow cytometry consulting company that provides services to companies and academic institutions in the areas of training, application development/testing, product development, marketing, and shared resource management.

Joanne has over 38 years of flow cytometry experience serving in roles as a Flow Cytometry Shared Resource Director at the University of Virginia for 17 years, as well as Technical Director of a Clinical Immunology and Flow Cytometry Laboratory at the University Medical Center of the State University of New York at Stony Brook for 17 years.

A paper co-authored by Joanne won the 2020 Best Paper Awardfor the journal Cytometry Part A.

One of Joanne’s greatest passions is submicron particle analysis by flow cytometry, an area for which she has been actively involved for the last ten years. She is currently an active member of the EV Flow Cytometry Working Group, whose mission is to educate users and standardize the measurements of EVs by flow cytometry.

I began my experience in flow cytometry at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1974, and was a member of the National Flow Cytometry Resource for almost all of it’s existence. I have been a user and a key operator, and was involved in software development for data display and analysis. I am retired and am now active primarily as faculty at flow cytometry courses.

“Be the change you want to see in the world”
– Gandhi

Dr. John Nolan received B.S. degrees in biology and chemistry at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from The Pennsylvania State University. After a postdoctoral position at the National Flow Cytometry Resource (NFCR), Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), he was promoted to the technical staff at LANL. There his lab pioneered quantitative and multiplexed flow cytometry approaches for analysis of molecular assemblies involved in catalysis, signaling, and pathogenesis, and for high throughput genomic analysis. He served as a co-investigator of the NFCR, 1996-2001, and principal investigator and director, 2001-2004. In 2004, he moved to the La Jolla Bioengineering Institute, where his lab develops instrumentation and reagents for quantitative and highly multiplexed cell and molecular analysis. His lab recently developed the first Raman flow cytometers, as well as technologies for the rapid and high resolution analysis of individual nanoparticles. Dr. Nolan serves on the editorial boards of Cytometry and Current Protocols in Cytometry, among others, and is an elected Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering.

Dr. T. Vincent Shankey received his Ph.D. degree in Immunology and Medical Microbiology from the University of Florida School of Medicine (1977) and a postdoctoral fellowship in Pathology at the University of Pennsylvania from 1977 to 1981.  His research has used flow and image cytometry for over thirty years, working in clinical flow cytometry for much of that time. Before joining the Advanced Technology Center/Systems Research Group at Beckman Coulter in 2001, he was the Director of Research for the Urology Department and Scientific Director of the Clinical Flow Cytometry laboratory at Loyola University Medical Center near Chicago, Illinois. In 2016 he joined AsedaSciences, a Biotech start-up operating at the Perdue University Bindley Biosciences Cntr, as Director of Research, developing cell-based assays to predict cellular responses to candidate compounds in the Pharma developmental pipeline. 

Kathleen graduated from Reed College with a BA in biology and went on to get her PhD from the University of Rochester Biology Department in Molecular Biology.  In her training, she happily focused on cell biology enjoying generating numbers with error bars.  Microscopy seemed a fuzzy science, pretty but how would she get a number from it?  However, in her research in the field of hematopoiesis, she has studied many different lineages where microscopy was critical to understanding their biology.  When the first commercial imaging flow cytometer became available in 2005, it provided the power of images that could be turned into numbers with error bars!  Since then, imaging flow cytometry has been a critical tool, alongside classic flow cytometry, as she tries to unlock the complexity of how hematopoiesis is formed during embryogenesis and how it is reformed after injury.   

Kathleen, along with a high proportion of other flow cytometrists, likes to cook.  She also spends an inordinate amount of time planning Disney vacations and doing other logic puzzles.