Bond Group Success at HAI
It was a highly successful weekend for Professor Jonathan Bond’s group at the Annual Meeting of the Haematology Association of Ireland in Galway. After giving an invited state of the art lecture, Bond was delighted to see two of his team receive prestigious awards.
The big prize of the weekend went to SBI post-doctoral researcher Dr. Luke Jones, who won the highly competitive Novartis Career Development Award. Jones's proposal won out against some stiff opposition from across the island of Ireland, and this award will allow him to do some cutting-edge research into epigenetic alterations that are linked to poor outcome in childhood leukaemia.
Another SBI researcher, Dr. Peter McCarthy, won the prize for the best clinical oral presentation. McCarthy presented his work on a rare subtype of paediatric lymphoma in the HAI Presidential Symposium, as one of the top four abstracts overall.
Professor Bond said “It was a great weekend for our group with Luke’s big award and Peter winning a prize for his clinical molecular project. Like other research teams in SBI, we are based in both the clinic and the laboratory, and these types of successes show how we're working together on both fronts".
Jones is originally from Australia and started working with the Bond group in May 2019. Prior to this, he was at Princess Maxima Center for Paediatric Oncology in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
McCarthy, who hails from Cork, is a clinical haematology specialist registrar in training. He joined the Bond team in July 2019.