50(th) Anniversary Congress of the Dutch Society of Immunology.

In December (17th-19th) 2014 we celebrated the 50th Anniversary of the Dutch Society for Immunology (Nederlandse Vereniging voor Immunologie (NVVI) in Dutch; Fig. 1). The NVVI was officially founded on 20th November 1964, by Prof. Dr. van Loghem, Prof. Dr. van Rood, Prof. Dr. Hijmans, Prof. Dr. Keuning and Prof. Dr. van Bekkum. This remarkable Anniversary Congress took place at the magical Fairy taletheme park De Efteling, Kaatsheuvel, The Netherlands (Fig. 2). The Congress was attended by almost 800 PI’s, post-docs, PhD students, technicians and master students. The theme, “A Future Heritage”, reflected that the great past of Dutch Immunology is a basis for an excellent future. True to the philosophy of the NVVI the program consisted of excellent talks of 4 Keynote speakers and 21 invited speakers. Out of the 363 submitted abstract, 80 were selected for an oral presentation in more than 20 different themes. In honor of the outstanding achievements of the founders of our society, who are experts in the field of transplantation immunology, Marcel van den Brink delivered the first Keynote lecture on the different aspects of allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (Fig. 3). His work addresses both fundamental and clinical research questions in this field. Marcel van den Brink, who is Dutch but based already for many years at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York in the USA, was awarded the EFIS Immunology Letters lecture award for all his achievements. The evening session of the first night started with a lecture of the winner of the 2014 NVVI Thesis Award, Liset Westera. She performed her PhD work at the Laboratory of Translational Immunology, Department of Immunology, University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands under the supervision of Dr. José Borghans News and EFIS