About Us
Welcome to the OHSU Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine!
The OHSU Department of Pathology is a dynamic academic department, providing world-class clinical care to our patients, fostering expanded basic science and research programs, innovating pathology education, and pursuing new advancements in patient care, teaching, and research. Using technology such as remote frozen section interpretation, we are improving turnaround times and the work-life balance of our physicians. Our collaborative work environment includes a junior faculty mentorship program, internal leadership opportunities, annual faculty retreat, faculty workgroups, and regular opportunities to share feedback and ideas as we strive for continuous program improvement. Our learners are integral members of our department, and our faculty are passionate educators. Collegiality, collaboration and a love of learning define us as a team of academic physicians and physicians in training.
Education
We pride ourselves on our enthusiastic, dedicated teachers, the comradery in our learners, and our devotion to the best of academic medicine. We offer an excellent residency program and five subspecialty fellowships. Our educational offerings also include the unique Pathology Student Fellowship, four medical student electives, visiting pathologists’ assistant student, and a pathology interest group. Our CME program regularly invites nationally recognized visiting speakers.
Clinical Care
Our pathologists provide exceptional diagnostic care for patients in OHSU Hospital, OHSU Clinics, Doernbecher’s Children’s Hospital, Portland Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and Shriner’s Hospitals for Children. In addition, we offer second opinions for patients as well as consultations for physicians throughout the Pacific Northwest and across the country. Our highly trained, subspecialized providers are devoted to providing state-of-the-art personalized medicine, integrating each patient’s detailed health history to form a precise diagnosis and contributing to the best possible prognosis.
Research
Research programs in pathology contribute extremely valuable data to the medical profession, often identifying new diagnostic markers for advancing the accuracy of patient diagnosis. Our research programs at OHSU are in a state of rapid growth, encompassing projects such as studying bladder cancer and cell invasion, placental mechanisms affecting the health of mother and baby, cutting edge molecular pathology analysis, hematologic malignancies, and neurodegenerative studies with the Oregon Brain Bank. In addition, we are actively recruiting physician scientists to continue to grow our research portfolio, including a partnership with OHSU’s Cancer Early Detection Advanced Research Center (CEDAR), devoted to early detection of breast, pancreas and lung cancers. The majority of our faculty are involved in clinical and translational research projects.
Department News
- Congratulations to Richelle Malott, MD, for her achievement winning the 2021 Excellence in Teaching award by the OHSU MD Program.
- Pathology faculty member Fei Yang, MD, is featured in a recent CAP Today article about gene nomenclature.
- Second year resident Cristina Magallanes Hoyos has been awarded a 2021 Society of '67 Kinney Scholar by the Association for Pathology Chairs, marking the second year in a row an OHSU resident has earned a spot in this program. Classmate Robert Christian received this award last year, as did former Pathology Student Fellow Lauren Raymond.
- Congratulations to OHSU Hematopathology Fellow, Todd Williams, MD, who won the 2020 Pathologist in Training Award from the Society for Hematopathology for his presentation at USCAP 2020, “Donor-Derived Clonal Hematopoiesis After Allogenic Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplant: Impact on Hematologic Recovery and Evaluation of Clonal Expansion.” OHSU Clinical Hematology Medical Director, Jennifer Dunlap, MD, is senior author.
- The first edition of Challenges & Updates in Pediatric Pathology, An Issue of Surgical Pathology Clinics, is guest edited by OHSU Director of Surgical Pathology, Jessica L. Davis, MD, and includes OHSU authors Drs. Matt Wood, Melanie Hakar and Jessica Davis as well as a residency program graduate, Dr. Sam Hwang.
- Drs. David Sauer and Jessica Davis were selected as two of the top pathologists in Portland Monthly’s Top Docs 2021
- Congratulations to David Loeffler, DO, who was nominated for the 2021 OHSU Flame Awards, Mentor Award – Faculty, recognizing faculty who demonstrate commitment to mentoring. Nominees have led by example and demonstrated commitment to prioritizing their students’ personal, intellectual and career development.
- Chair Donna Hansel, MD, PhD covers what we’ve learned over the past year in the fight against SARS-CoV-2 on KOIN 6’s podcast Beyond the Headlines: One Year of Disease.
- OHSU Pathology is excited to join the social media community with our new accounts on Twitter and Instagram.
- Chair Donna Hansel, MD, PhD is interviewed on OPB's radio show Think Out Loud about new variants of SARS-CoV-2 and the Department of Pathology’s partnership with the Oregon SARS-CoV-2 Genome Sequencing Center at OHSU.
- The OHSU COVID-19 Laboratory in collaboration with Dr. Brian O’Roak and his sequencing team have identified the highly infectious UK variant of COVID-19 in OHSU patients.
- Portland wastewater screening, community testing will attempt to head off coronavirus outbreaks
- Chair Donna Hansel, MD, PhD, is interviewed by KATU News about the advantages of in-person COVID-19 testing
- Robert Christian MD, MS, OHSU Pathology PGY-2 Resident, won the Society of ’67 Open Access Award from the Association of Pathology Chairs for his abstract "Using Dynamic Virtual Microscopy to Train Pathology Residents During the Pandemic: Faculty and Trainee Perspectives on Pathology Education in the Age of COVID-19"
- OHSU expands COVID-19 testing lab, processes 100,000th test