We are excited to present SoCal Flow’s first cytometrist expert panel discussion: Standardization in Flow Cytometry.
After extensive discussion, the SoCal Flow executive and planning committee invited four panelists: Anna Belkina (Boston University), Joseph Trotter (BD Biosciences), Yoav Altman (Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, and Christopher Trussell (Genomics Institute of Novartis Research Foundation). These individuals represent a spectrum of expertise from both academia and industry. We thank our panelists for accepting the invitation to discuss how to create reproducible, high-quality, consistent, and ultimately standardized data that can be evaluated and compared across platforms and users!
Anna C. Belkina is the Associate Director of the Flow Cytometry Core Facility and an Instructor (appointment pending final confirmation) in the Department of Pathology at Boston University School of Medicine. She received her M.D. from Russian State Medical University in Moscow and her Ph.D degree from Boston University School of Medicine investigating the epigenetic regulation of inflammatory responses driven by bromodomain proteins. Anna’s research is focused on the intersection of immunology and computational biology, for her current research efforts include investigating the immune landscape of chronic inflammatory diseases and developing computational techniques to assess high-parameter single cell cytometry data. Anna is an active member of ISAC (International Society for the Advancement of Cytometry) and has been named 2015-2019 ISAC SRL Emerging Leader.
Joe Trotter, Principal Scientist, BD Fellow, is a key flow cytometry expert of BD Biosciences. He was honored as a 2010 Wesley J. Howe Award of BD Fellow not only for his outstanding contributions to the flow cytometry business of BD Biosciences, but for his extensive contributions over 30 years to the field of flow cytometry. Joe has been contributing to the development of flow cytometry beginning with collaborations in the 1970’s, while in the laboratories of Robert Holley and Renato Dulbecco at the Salk Institute, with the early Los Alamos National Laboratory flow cytometry engineering efforts which helped to establish flow as a key tool in biology and medicine. While at Salk, to address user needs he built several early high-performance cytometers, including a multi-laser/multi-parameter cell sorter in the mid 1980’s with customized software developed at Los Alamos that could be configured with either a cuvette based or a jet-in-air flow cell design. He served as Director of Flow Cytometry at the Salk Institute for well over a decade before taking the role of Flow Cytometry Core Lab Director at The Scripps Research Institute in the mid 1990’s. Prior to joining BD Biosciences in 2000, Joe’s interest in flow cytometry software and data visualization motivated him to develop the flow cytometry data analysis WinMDI, which for many years was downloaded and used by thousands of investigators worldwide to analyze and publish their data.
Yoav Altman joined Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in 2002, first as manager and since 2009 as director of the NCI-designated Cancer Center’s Flow Cytometry Shared Resource. The core provides cell sorting, analytical flow cytometry
and imaging flow cytometry services to hundreds of researchers from more than 40 labs conducting basic and applied immunology, infectious disease, stem cell, aging, neuroscience, muscle and cancer research. Yoav’s current interests include measuring small biological particles by Imaging Flow Cytometry, and implementing new tools for management and delivery of core services. Yoav graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a Bachelors degree in Integrative Biology and worked as an imaging facility specialist at La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology before moving to SBP.
Christopher Trussell is a 1996 graduate of Cal Poly, Pomona. He began his career in the Cellular Immunology department of the Corning Nichols institute. He learned clinical flow cytometry under the tutelage of Teri Oldaker. After 2 years there, he moved home to San Diego and took a job doing research flow cytometry at TSRI. Under the guidance of Joseph Trotter, Chris learned the ins and outs of both cell analyzers, sorters, and experimental design. In 2000, he moved on to the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF), where he is currently. While at GNF, Chris has worked with GNF engineering to develop automated plate based flow cytometry for HT screening. More recently, he has turned his attention to the automation of the Bio-Rad Ze5 flow cytometer to enable more efficient cytometer usage. Lab standardization has also become a focus of the GNF flow cytometry lab. He has created voltage conversion tables and customized stain indexes to help users compare data across multiple LSR Fortessas.