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Dianne E. van der Wal, PhD

Researcher
ANZAC Research Institute
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Dr Dianne E. van der Wal is senior researcher, currently at the ANZAC Research Institute, Sydney, Australia. Her work has been cited for over 1050 times. She has been a senior research fellow at the Australian Red Cross Lifeblood R&D for over 8 years, where she studied all factors influencing the quality of platelet components for transfusion. She has extensive experience in translational research related to blood products, particularly in glycans and platelet function, thrombosis, and transfusion medicine. Her expertise includes surface glycans on platelets, lipids and extracellular vesicles, cell death mechanisms, and general platelet function. She is one of the social media and associate editors for the Journal of Thrombosis and Haemostasis, a principal editor for Platelets journal and co-chair of the Platelet Physiology SSC of the ISTH. She is also a member of the Australian & New Zealand Society for Blood Transfusion (ANZSBT) Education Standing Committee. She received multiple (inter)national grants and awards. She enjoys mentoring of students and is active in science communication. During her first postdoc based in Toronto, Canada, with Prof. Heyu Ni, she previously showed that desialylation is important for platelet clearance in bleeding disorder ITP, potentially leading to novel diagnosis or treatment approaches. This was published in a landmark paper in Nature Communications and has been cited 360 times. During her PhD, at the University Medical Centre Utrecht in the Netherlands, she demonstrated novel platelet apoptosis pathways following cold-storage, which she applied to address fundamental questions in transfusion biology, such as determining the factors that impact the quality and effectiveness of platelet components for transfusion.

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