Brief Bio for the 2026 ISBT Presidential Award winner, Professor Martin L Olsson, to Transfusion Today, April 2026
Martin L. Olsson received his M.D. in 1991 and Ph.D. in 1997 from Lund University in Sweden where he is now a Professor and Senior Consultant in Transfusion Medicine since 2006and Medical Director oftheNordic Reference Laboratory for Blood Group Genomics since 2001.
He was a Guest Researcher at IBGRL in Bristol, UK, in 1996 and Visiting Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School in 2003-2008. He recently served as Vice Dean for Research and Deputy Dean during six yearsfor the Faculty of Medicine at Lund University.
His main clinical and research interests include the molecular genetics and biochemistry of blood groups and their functional roles in health and disease, especially carbohydrate antigens and the use of bacterial enzymes for generating ABO-universal blood. Prof. Olsson has a long list of peer-reviewed articles and is a frequently invited speaker.
His many awards include prestigious prizes from AABB, BBTS, ISBT and other organizations. He was the first ISBT Scientific Secretary in 2011-2015, on the Executive Committee of the ISBT Board in 2016-2022 and served as President of ISBT 2018-2020.
He was appointed Wallenberg Clinical Scholar by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2016 and is currently the President of the Swedish Society of Clinical Immunology and Transfusion Medicine.
Privately and professionally, Martin is married to Adjunct Professor Jill Storry, his closest collaborator. In his spare time, Martin is a keen art collector and likes to play the piano and other musical instruments when he doesn’t play tennis, watches birds or enjoys Scandinavian winter bathing. Significantly, he opened his Ph.D. thesis with a quote from Paul Simon, “Medicine Is Magical – Magical Is Art”, a motto he still stands by. When the two of them met in an ice cream shop in Sweden, Mr. Simon retrospectively approved this use of his lyrics after a long discussion involving purchase of two scoops of pistachio in a cone to the famous singer-song writer.