Morphology 2024

Professor Cecilia Brassett

University of Cambridge

Cecilia Brassett came to the UK from Hong Kong in 1981 to study medicine at Downing College, University of Cambridge. She initially trained as a general surgeon, receiving the Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1991. She then resigned and took an intensive course in field linguistics before working among an ethnic minority group in south central China for some years before returning to the UK. During her surgical training, she worked as an anatomy demonstrator in the Human Dissection Room at Cambridge and taught anatomy in different colleges. In 2009, she was appointed the University Clinical Anatomist at the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, where she was responsible for organising anatomy teaching for the Cambridge medical course. She is currently the Teaching Professor of Human Anatomy and is involved in a number of collaborative anatomy research projects with clinical colleagues. In addition to her departmental duties, she is a Fellow of Magdalene College, where she is Director of Studies for Preclinical Medicine, Undergraduate Tutor and Deputy Senior Tutor. She is a Councillor of both the Anatomical Society and the British Association of Clinical Anatomists, and was recently invited to take up the post of Vice-President of the Institute of Anatomical Sciences. She is an external examiner for a number of universities in the UK and is on the Court of Examiners for the Royal College of Surgeons.

Professor Zbigniew Kmieć

University of Gdansk

Dr. Zbigniew Kmieć graduated from the Medical Faculty of the Gdańsk Medical University, Poland, in 1977. He was introduced into histology and experimental gerontology by Professor Andrzej Mysliwski, MD, PhD. His experiments with hepatocytes isolated from old and young rats resulted in 1981 in PhD thesis. He expanded his knowledge of histochemistry and electron microscopy during a sabbatical year at the Institute of Anatomy, University of Wuerzburg, Germany, led by Prof. T.H. Schiebler. Dr. Z. Kmiec was awarded a Wellcome Trust scholarship to study prostanoids’ synthesis by hepatocytes in the Liver Unit, King’s College Hospital, London, UK, led by Dr. R. Williams between 1988 and 1989, and this cooperation continued until 2004. In 2001, he finalized his interests in liver structure and function by publishing in Springer Verlag monograph Cooperation of Liver Cells in Health and Disease, which has since been cited over 700 times. By the turn of the 20th century, Dr. Kmiec has started cooperating with clinicians by studying the expression of novel genes in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), colorectal cancer, and renal cell carcinoma using molecular biology, cell biology and immunohistochemical techniques. In 2006, he published textbook Histology and Cytophysiology of Tooth and Oral Cavity, currently available on-line, which has been widely accepted by Polish students of dentistry. In the Department of Histology Dr. Kmiec passed all the stages of academic career and received an ordinary professorship in 2003. He was the Head of the Department from 2007 till 2023, and, despite reaching pension age, he is part-time employed at the Medical University of Gdańsk.

Prof. Z. Kmieć was an active member of the Polish Society of Histochemistry and Cytochemistry as its President in the years 2004 - 2009. In 2008, he organized the 14th International Congress of Histochemistry and Cytochemistry (ICHC) in Gdańsk with 550 participants and 80 lecturers from abroad. At the next ICHC in Kyoto, he was elected Secretary General of the International Federation of Societies for Histochemistry and Cytochemistry (IFSHC) council and acted in this position from 2012 till 2022. In 2012, Prof. Kmieć was elected the editor-in-chief of Folia Histochemica et Cytobiologica (IF 1.5) and is also an editorial board member of the Journal of Molecular Histology, European Journal of Histochemistry, and Advances in Anatomy, Embryology and Cell Biology.