Steering Committee

Prof Dr Tessa Kerre

Tessa Kerre is Head of Clinic at the Department of Haematology, at the Ghent University Hospital, Belgium.

She is Associate Professor at the Ghent University. She is Senior Clinical Investigator of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) and is Clinical Director of the stem cell transplant unit, Ghent University Hospital. She obtained her PhD from Ghent University in 2002. She has been a specialist in internal medicine since 2005 and in clinical haematology since 2006. She worked as a visiting physician at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle and University of Washington Medical Center, Seattle in 2008 and in 2010.

Professor Kerre's research interests lie in the fields of acute leukemia, stem cell transplantation and T-cell therapy, and immunodeficiency. She has received multiple scientific awards for her work. In 2003 she obtained the 'PfizerPharmacia' award for the best PhD in medical sciences. She was a board member from 2010 to 2014 of the Belgian Hematological Society (BHS), of which she still is an active member of several committees, she is chair of the BHS transplant committee since 2019. She is an EMA advisor and she is a board member of the Belgian Primary Immunodeficiency Group (BPIDG) since 2016. Prof. dr. Kerre is a steering committee member of both the Immuno-oncology Network (ION) Ghent and of the Cancer Research Institute Ghent (CRIG) (2016-2019), she is CRIG group leader. She is a reviewer for many journals including Blood, Journal of Leukocyte Biology, Acta Clinica Belgica, Clinical and Experimental Immunology, Leukemia and Lymphoma and International Journal of Cancer. She has been an author on more than 65 manuscripts published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. She has developed Immuno-T, a motion comic explaining several forms of immunotherapy to patients and their caregivers (immune-T.inmotion.care), for which she received a Prize for science communication from the ‘Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor wetenschappen en kunsten’ and the ‘Jonge Academie’ and the Public prize from EOS magazine, in 2018.