Dr. Arjan Diepstra is a hematopathologist at the University Medical Center Groningen and a principal investigator in the SALL (stem cells, aging, leukemia, and lymphoma) program of the CRCG (Cancer Research Center Groningen). His main research interests include malignant lymphoma, particularly Hodgkin lymphoma, with a strong focus on the interactions between tumor cells and the microenvironment. In his Ph.D. thesis "Classical Hodgkin lymphoma: population-based studies on HLA and EBV (2007)" and follow-up studies, he discovered that the HLA system is intricately involved in Hodgkin lymphoma susceptibility, pathogenesis, and prognosis and published these findings in the Lancet, Journal of Clinical Oncology, and Blood. He secured three Dutch Cancer Society grants to conduct functional follow-up studies on these findings. Fruitful international collaborations include the Interlymph consortium on genome-wide association studies, the Lymphoma group of the EORTC, and various groups in the UK, Canada, and the US. His areas of expertise are immunology, tumor cell biology, association studies, and molecular diagnostics in pathology.