Scientific Committee

Get to know the Labquality Days Scientific Committee, responsible for planning the international laboratory medicine portion of the scientific programme.

Päivi Laitinen, Chair

Head Chemist, emerita, Adjunct Professor

Päivi Laitinen has been the Chair of the Scientific Committee since 2016. She has diverse experience working in different university hospital laboratories and a central hospital laboratory. In addition to her vast education and experience in clinical biochemistry, she also holds a Master of Health Sciences with a major in healthcare administration. Her national and international activities include memberships in several boards such as the Finnish Society of Clinical Chemistry, the European Communities Confederation of Clinical Chemistry (EC4), and the International Federation of Clinical Chemistry (IFCC) to mention only a few. She has published over 70 peer-reviewed articles, previously in the area of prenatal screening and more recently publications of the EFLM Working Group on Cardiac Markers of which she Chaired. Päivi Laitinen retired from her position of Head Chemist at HUS Diagnostic Center HUSLAB in 2022.

Anja Kessler

Dr. rer. nat.

Anja Kessler is Director of the Reference Institute for Bioanalytics (RfB) in Bonn, Germany. Her work focuses on external quality assessment (EQA), metrological traceability, and the development of reference methods and materials in laboratory medicine. She is actively involved in international initiatives and committees, including EQALM and IFCC task forces, contributing to the standardization and continuous improvement of laboratory quality worldwide.

Anna Linko-Parviainen

MD, Associate Professor, Chief Physician

Anna Linko-Parvinen, MD, Associate Professor, is Chief Physician in Clinical Chemistry at Tyks Laboratories, Turku University Hospital, Finland. She also holds a teaching position at the University of Turku. She served as Chair of the Finnish Society of Clinical Chemistry for more than eight years, and has been a member of the EFLM Committee on the Post Analytical Phase for three terms. Within this committee, she initiated a survey on Minimum Retesting Intervals (MRI). Her research interests include laboratory quality improvement, method performance evaluation, and evaluation of diagnostic accuracy, and she is particularly interested in international collaboration. 

Dalius Vitkus

PhD, EuSpLM, Associate Professor

Dalius Vitkus is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences of the Faculty of Medicine of Vilnius University, Head of the Centre of Laboratory Medicine of Vilnius University Hospital Santaros Klinikos, Lithuania. Dalius Vitkus is also the Chair of the Technical Committee “Awards & Grants” of the European Federation of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (EFLM) and the President of the Lithuanian Society of Laboratory Medicine. He is also a former chair, currently a member of the Steering Committee of the Performance Specification Working Group of the European Organization for External Quality Assurance Providers in Laboratory Medicine (EQALM), and the Editor-in-Chief of the journal “Laboratorine Medicina“ of the Lithuanian Society of Laboratory Medicine. His scientific interests focus on Quality Management in Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine, External Quality Assessment (PT/EQA), Enzymes and Protein Biomarkers, and Teaching and Postgraduate Training in Laboratory Medicine.

Marc Thelen

Professor

Marc Thelen is trained as a specialist in laboratory medicine and works as the scientific director of the EQA organiser SKML, Nijmegen, Netherlands. In that role, he is a professor of quality in medical laboratory care at the Radboud University Medical Centre in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The central topic of his interest and research is the relationship between measurement uncertainty and the certainty of clinical classification. This includes the development and application of quality control strategies to assess whether analytical performance specifications are met. Marc is chair of the EFLM division of quality, standards and regulations, and for EQALM, he chairs the working group on performance specifications. He is associate editor for the Journal of Applied Laboratory Medicine (JALM).

Rachel Marrington

Professor

Rachel Marrington is a Clinical Scientist at Birmingham Quality, part of University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, where she has worked for the past ten years. During her clinical scientist training, she developed EQA schemes for Urine Chemistries and Urine Dipstick Analysis, both of which remain in use today. She is an HCPC-registered Clinical Scientist and a Fellow of The Royal College of Pathologists.

Drawing on her experience in routine clinical biochemistry laboratories, Rachel has developed a strong understanding of laboratory requirements for External Quality Assessment (EQA) and Post-Market Surveillance. She is passionate about improving the quality of laboratory results for the benefit of patients and believes that EQA plays a vital role in quality assurance across the analytical, pre-analytical and post-analytical phases of laboratory medicine.

Her current interests focus on the use of EQA data to support post-market surveillance and drive improvements in laboratory quality. She is particularly interested in fostering collaboration and discussion across Europe to help advance best practices in this area.