Contributors

As a medical student at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, Sibrandes Poppema worked in a pathology lab, and he enjoyed the research so much that he decided to also pursue a doctorate in pathology. Poppema says he immediately set his sights on studying Hodgkin’s disease, a type of lymphoma. “It’s a cancer,” he says, “but it’s a cancer where less than one percent of it is tumor cells—ninety-nine percent are reactive cells,” immune cells that are reacting to something in their environment. After receiving his medical degree in 1974 and his pathology doctorate in 1979, he completed two postdocs, one at the Christian-Albrecht University of Kiel in Germany and one at Harvard Medical School in Boston, before returning to the University of Groningen as an immunopathology professor. In 1987, he moved to Canada to join the leadership of the Cross Cancer Institute at the University of Alberta, but ...