SIOPE Board Members are Ready to Kick-start a New Year

24/02/2016
The composition of the SIOPE Board underwent major changes during the past months. This process resulted in a SIOPE Board composed of twelve committed members, each of them responsible for specific areas of our Strategic Plan. SIOPE Board 2016In particular, this year we could welcome another new Board members. More recently Lars Hjorth M.D. Ph.D. has accepted the position of an appointed member of the SIOPE Board, as per our Statutes. Consultant Paediatric Oncology & Haematology at the Department of Paediatrics of the Skåne University Hospital Lund University (Sweden), Lars Hjorth has been invited to join the Board as the Leader of Objective 6 ‘Quality of childhood cancer survivorship’ of the SIOPE Strategic Plan, because of his experience as Chair of the PanCare network (Pan-European Network for Care of Survivors after Childhood and Adolescent Cancer) and Coordinator of the PanCareSurFup EU project, as well as his expertise in all the survivorship work that he has been involved in during the last 7-8 years in the field of long term follow up of paediatric cancers, survivorship issues, late complications, nephrotoxicity, quality of life, and bone sarcomas. Considering all the work he has done in in the past four years, and in particularly for his dedication as member of the SIOPE Board we would like to warmly thank Prof Henrik Hasle from University Hospital Skeljby in Aarhus, Denmark. The Presidency of our Society also changed on 1st January 2016. We would like to warmly thank Prof Gilles Vassal, our outgoing President and immediate Past President of SIOPE, for having paved the way to the full strategic development of SIOPE in the course of the past years. It is particularly thanks to him if SIOPE has grown into the bigger and highly recognised entity it is today, with clear objectives endorsed by all. Last but not least, we would like to proudly introduce to you the new President of SIOPE, Prof Martin Schrappe. Prof Schrappe is a member of the SIOPE Board since 2009 and he is Full Professor of Paediatrics and Director of the Department of General Paediatrics at the University Medical Centre Schleswig-Holstein, Christian-Albrechts University of Kiel (Germany). Sitting in the boards of various national and international paediatric haematology-oncology clinical study groups, Martin Schrappe is the Chairman of the I-BFM study group since 1998, he is one of the Activity Coordinators in the ENCCA project and will also represent our Society within the Board of ECCO. He has extensively published in major medical journals and his research focuses on acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) in childhood.New Presidency