Claudio Ortolani was born in Venice in 1950. He obtained his MD degree at Padua University, and is a board approved specialist in Internal medicine, Clinical Biology, and General Haematology. He has been working in the Clinical Pathology Department of the Venice General Hospital, running since 1986 one of the first diagnostic flow cytometry unit in Italy. As senior consultant, his main clinical activity has been the diagnosis of haematological neoplasms, with a particular interest in lymphoproliferative diseases. He has been past president of the GIC, the Italian Society for Cytometry, and is member of the Editorial Board of The International Journal of Biological Markers. He is very active in teaching flow cytometry in many national and international courses, and since 1994 is Lecturer in Cellular Pathology at Padua University. He is co-author of 20 refereed journal published original papers. He is the author of the first Italian reference manual of flow cytometric analysis of hematological malignancies, now at its second edition.

Programme as an elected ESCCA Board Member:

1. to promote the proper use of flow cytometry, with a special interest in technical aspects of the technique;
2. to promote education in the use of flow cytometry as a diagnostic tool in Clinical Haematology, with a special interest in the standardization of the measurements and in the production of guidelines.