Dr. Camilla Forsberg is a Professor of Biomolecular Engineering and Director of the Institute for the Biology of Stem Cells (IBSC) at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). She earned BS degrees in Chemistry from the University of Sundsvall (Sweden) and Central Florida and her PhD in Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, followed by postdoctoral training in developmental and stem cell biology with Dr. Irving Weissman at Stanford University. She joined UCSC as an Assistant Professor in 2007 and has directed the IBSC since 2012. In 2015, Camilla was promoted to Full Professor. Camilla has been deeply engaged with ISEH throughout her career and has served terms on the Board of Directors, on the Nominations Committee, on the Editorial Board of Experimental Hematology, and, since 2021, on the ISEH committee for Awards in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Leadership, for which she helped to develop the framework. 

As Director of the IBSC, Camilla has built a portfolio of training programs designed to open pathways into science for underrepresented students and postdocs, including an NIH IRACDA program run jointly with the Hispanic-Serving California State University (Monterey Bay, CA), a co-led NIH T32 postdoctoral training grant, and CIRM-funded training programs for graduate students and postdocs. She has paired this institutional work with hands-on mentorship. For example, she has mentored PhD students who have received the HHMI Gilliam Fellowship, which supports joint mentor-mentee training for underrepresented groups. Working in concert with this trainee, she co-founded the Graduate Student Council for UCSC's Program in Biomedical Sciences and Engineering to give students a formal voice in their own education. Most recently, Camilla has extended her efforts for inclusivity to an international level, by visiting research institutions in Kenya and supporting students there to prepare competitive applications for PhD programs in the USA. She is also a faculty mentor member of AuthorAID, a global supportive network for researchers in low- and middle-income countries.  

Colleagues describe her as a mentor who treats cultural awareness as a practiced, ongoing skill rather than a checkbox, and her trainees' track record bears this out: over the past five years, every trainee in her lab has secured a predoctoral or postdoctoral fellowship. Congratulations, Camilla, on this well-earned recognition! 

Dr. Margaret "Peggy" Goodell is the recipient of the 2026 ISEH Outstanding Mentor Award, recognizing her three-decade record of training scientists who have become leaders in the field of Experimental Hematology. Peggy currently serves as Chair of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Director of the Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine Center at Baylor College of Medicine (Houston, TX), where she also holds the Vivian L. Smith Chair of Regenerative Medicine. She earned her BS in Biochemistry from Imperial College London and her PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Cambridge. She then trained as a postdoctoral fellow at the Whitehead Institute at MIT and Harvard Medical School, joining Baylor as an Assistant Professor in 1997. Peggy's own service to ISEH runs deep: she served as the Society's President in 2013–2014, having previously served as Vice President and on the Board of Directors, and she received the ISEH Donald Metcalf Award in 2023. 

Peggy's trainees read like a roster of the field's next generation: her lab has produced multiple independent investigators actively contributing to the field, including Fernando Camargo, Grant Challen, Katherine King, Teresa Bowman, Shannon McKinney-Freeman, among many others. Indeed, it is rare to attend a hematology meeting without encountering Goodell lab alumni, or their own trainees, presenting. Her earliest PhD students fondly recall being taught directly by Peggy at the bench herself the highest standards in flow cytometry, cell sorting, and transplanting mice. They further note that Peggy’s high standards are always paired with fairness, and that she is an exceptional model for building a career in science while also maintaining a fulfilling personal life, such as nurturing a family. Her lessons and examples have shaped how her own trainees have gone on to mentor others in turn. Colleagues describe a mentor who always makes time for trainees when it matters and who treats their success as her top priority, despite running a demanding lab and taking on major leadership roles, including ISEH President, along the way. Scientifically, Peggy's own path opened doors for her trainees to walk through: her discovery of Hoechst dye efflux as a marker of stem cell populations, made during her postdoctoral training, has been cited more than 2,000 times, and her lab's later work identifying DNMT3A as a key regulator of blood stem cell fate reshaped the field's understanding of this frequently mutated gene in blood cancers and clonal hematopoiesis. Congratulations, Peggy, on this well-deserved recognition!