Introduction to Michael E. Robbins Memorial Issue

By the time of his death on 23 November 2012, Michael (Mike) E. Robbins had gained a national and, indeed, international , reputation as a leader in the fi eld of radiation-induced normal tissue eff ects. For the fi nal decade or so of his career, Mike had been based at Wake Forest Medical Center, an institution where he had developed a world-class research program looking at the prevention and treatment of radiation-associated tissue injury, with a specifi c interest in radiation-induced brain injury. Although the impact of Mike ' s body of work in the latter area of research is clearly highlighted in the paper proff ered by Prasanna et al. (2014), his death at a relatively young age cut short a career and sphere of infl uence that had spanned decades and continents. Born in London, UK, in 1954, Mike began his academic career at Th ames Polytechnic, London (now the University of Greenwich), and received his bachelor ' s degree in Applied Biology in 1976. He remained at Th ames Polytechnic for his postgraduate studies, investigating the eff ects of parathyroid hormones on the kidney in domestic fowl, and obtained his PhD in 1980. Th at same year, Mike joined the staff of the as a post-doctoral fellow, where he was fi rst introduced to the world of radiation biology. He readily integrated his prior knowledge of kidney function with the tenets of radiation biology and, in parallel with prestigious research groups such as Moulder et al. (2014), helped to provide the foundation of work performed in renal radiation biology that subsequent investigators, such as Scharpfenecker (de Cortie et al. 2014), continue to build upon to this day. But in addition to his work on kidney, it was during this period that Mike acquired a wider reputation as an innovative researcher, leading to an broadened his research scope to more diverse aspects of radiation-induced normal tissue injury: Exploring eff ects in tissues other than kidney, such as skin and the central nervous system; modeling clinical translational problems, an area of study that continues to be of interest to his earlier mentor and colleagues at Oxford (Jones and Hopewell 2014); and investigating tissue-organ interactions, marking the start of his interest in tissue microenvironment. Th is latter fi eld of research remains relatively unexplored in respect to normal tissues, but the implications of such interactions are highlighted in the …