Robert Hewitt studied medicine at St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical School, London and later obtained a PhD at the Medical Research Council Virology Unit, Univ. of Glasgow. He worked 5 years in pathology as Clinical lecturer in Pathology at the University of Nottingham, before moving to Bethesda, Maryland, USA, to take up an NIH research fellowship from 1994-98 at the Lab of Pathology of the US National Cancer Institute. Robert has been involved in biobanking for the past sixteen years, and has been involved in setting up biobanks at Hammersmith Hospital in London, UK; then King Faisal Specailist Hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; and then National University Hospital in Singapore (the NUH-NUS Tissue Repository) where he also established a hospital-based cancer registry. He was ISBER president from 2008-2009 and chaired numerous committees from 2006 to 2013. He co-founded ESBB in 2010 and was Executive Officer from the start until October 2017. He was also European Editor of the journal, Biopreservation and Biobanking from 2009-2016. He was winner of the ISBER Distinguished Leadership & Service Award (2011) and the ISBER Outstanding Achievement in Biobanking (2012).
