To contribute to the next newsletter, send an email to Donna Martin (dmart06@emory.edu).

December 2015

CRITICAL VALUES -

Charlie Hill, MD, PhD Colleen Kraft, MD Crystal Evans

1

Michelle Reid, MD

Adeboye Osunkoya, MD

John Roback, MD, PhD

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NEW FACULTY -

George Deeb, MD 2

Lara Harik, MD 2

CASE REPORTS -

Robert Bray, PhD 2

Jim Ritchie, PhD 2

Sharon Weiss, MD 3

Ifor Williams, MD, PhD 3

Aftab Ansari, PhD 3

INTERESTING WEB LINKS -

Pathologists in the News 3

PHOTO PAGE -

Retirement Party Composite: Bhagirath Majmudar, MD

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IN THIS ISSUE

Sharing Lessons Learned from Ebola and Preparing for Future Outbreaks

(see Comment)

The traditional approach to mastering a new medical procedure is “See one, do one, teach one.” With the largest Ebola outbreak in history now apparently waning, leaving more than 11,000 dead in its wake (nearly all in west Africa), a nationwide effort is underway to under-stand the lessons learned and to better prepare the U.S. healthcare system to confront emerging infectious patho-gens in the future. As part of that effort, Emory pathologists, infectious disease specialists, nurses, and others who helped successfully care for four Ebola pa-tients at Emory University Hospital in 2014 are sharing their experiences and advice with other professionals through a major teaching project organized by the Atlan-ta-based U.S. Centers for Disease and Control and Pre-vention (CDC). Supported in part by a 5-year, $12-million NIH grant for which Emory is the lead institution, Associate Professor Charlie Hill, M.D., Ph.D., Assistant Professor Colleen Kraft, M.D., and Emory Medical Labora-tories technologist Crystal Evans, are teaching in a series of courses and workshops, based at the CDC campus, for healthcare workers from across the country. They are also traveling to do on-site assessments of outbreak pre-paredness at the state and local levels. Their topics in-clude details of the point-of-care model that was devel-oped at Emory to provide all needed diagnostic testing inside a high-containment patient-care facility, a model that has since been adopted by hospitals around the world. Another vital take-home message: Learning to safely don and doff your protective gloves, clothing, and equipment is key. Showing the Way (left to right):

Dr Kraft, Dr Hill, and Ms Evans

Adeboye Osunkoya, MD

Leading (left-to-right): Drs. Roback, Reid, and Osunkoya

COMMENT: In this case, it’s “See four, save four, teach hundreds.”

Each year since the Emory Clinic launched its own in-house leadership development course for physicians three years ago, Pathology faculty have been nomi-nated and selected to undergo this elite training. The program, now known as EM-ProLEAD, is designed to enhance leadership skills, business knowledge, net-working, and collaborative efforts across Emory Medi-cine, with a unique focus on our own organization, its people, and the local healthcare marketplace. Michelle Reid, M.D., a cytopathologist and surgi-cal pathologist, is among the two-dozen members of the current (2016) class, following in the footsteps of genitourinary pathologist Adeboye Osunkoya, M.D. (2014) and of Vice Chair and transfusion medicine specialist John Roback, M.D., Ph.D. (2015). All three are Associate Professors. The program is directed by Drs. Doug Morris (Cardiology) and Harold Simon (Pediatrics) in collaboration with leaders from the Goi-zueta Business School.

Pathologists Prepare for Healthcare Leadership at Emory

December 2015

NEW FACULTY— George Deeb, M.D.

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Dr. Deeb was not impressed: His first win-ter in Atlanta featured a paltry 0.3 inches of snow—meager indeed, compared to the 95 inch-es that typically fall on Buffalo, New York, where he’s spent most of the past two decades. But could it be that our balmier climate brought back memories of Da-mascus, Syria, where he was raised, earned his medical degree, and completed two years of AP residency before emi-grating to the U.S. in 1998? Landing squarely at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buf-falo, Dr. Deeb proceeded through a complete four-year AP/CP residency

(including a year as Chief Resident) and then a yearlong fel-lowship in oncologic surgical pathology at its highly regarded affiliate, the Roswell Park Cancer Institute (RPCI). But his true professional passion is hematopathology, which led him next to pursue a year’s fellowship in that subspecialty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, before returning to join the faculty at the RPCI and SUNY-Buffalo in 2005. Since then, Dr. Deeb has practiced hematopathology full-time, serving those two institu-tions along with community pathologists and oncologists throughout upstate New York, helping to oversee the flow and image cytometry labs, and rising to be Director of Hemato-pathology at RPCI from 2010 until we recruited him away to Emory last November. As the newest recruit to our flourishing hemepath service and our new Director of Flow Cytometry, Dr. Deeb has already proven himself an expert diagnostician, a caring and patient-centered physician, a committed teacher, and a wonderful colleague. So we’re not just happy to have him on our faculty – we’re impressed!

George Deeb, M.D.

Case Reports

Pathology’s clinical ser-vices couldn’t function without gifted general-ists as well as expert subspecialists on our faculty. Dr. Lara Harik is both. After training that included two spe-cialized clinical fellow-ships in genitourinary (GU) pathology and a third in the wider land-scape of oncologic sur-gical pathology, Dr. Harik spent the past eight years honing her generalist and GU skills on the faculty at Co-lumbia University in New York, so she was already superbly quali-fied and experienced by the time she joined our faculty on September 1. We’re proud to have contributed to her training: Graduated from medical school at the American University in Beirut, Dr. Harik came to Emory in 2001 to pursue both AP/CP residency and her first GU fellow-ship in our program, where early signs of her talent included winning a Stowell-Orbison Certificate-of-Merit for her 2005 USCAP poster surveying 200 needle-core biopsies of kidney masses. Those helped catapult her into her two subsequent fellowships at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and then onto the Columbia faculty, where she worked both as a general surgical pathologist at New York Presbyterian Hospital and on a busy GU outreach service. Along the way, she pub-lished nearly a dozen papers and a chapter in the Silverberg textbook, and regularly lectured on general and GU pathology to medical students and residents at Columbia. All of which made Dr. Harik a perfect fit for Emory Pathology, where she now divides her time between the GU service at EUH and our demanding generalist practice at Midtown. How did we ever get along without her?

NEW FACULTY— Lara Harik, M.D.

The American Society for Histocompatibility and Immu-nogenetics has honored Pro-fessor Robert Bray, Ph.D., as recipient of the 2014 Terasa-ki Clinical Science Award. The award recognizes his many “significant accomplish-ments and contributions to the fields of clinical trans-plantation, histocompatibility, and immunogenetics”. To-gether with his longtime col-league, Howard Gebel, Ph.D., Dr. Bray is co-Director of our internationally acclaimed Histocompatibility and Molec-ular Immunogenetics clinical laboratory, which is critical to the success of Emory’s organ-transplantation programs.

Lara Harik, MD

Professor Jim Ritchie, Ph.D., our Director of Emory Medi-cal Laboratories, has been elected to a three-year cy-cle of leadership of the Na-tional Academy of Clinical Biochemists, which is the scientific branch of the American Association of Clinical Chemistry. Dr. Ritchie will serve as Presi-dent-Elect for 2016, as President in 2017, and as Past-President in 2018.

Jim Ritchie, Ph.D. Robert Bray, Ph.D.

December 2015

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Ifor Williams, M.D., Ph.D.

Case Reports

Pathologists

in the News

Emory Pathology Residents Facebook

· https://www.facebook.com/EmoryPathologyResidents?ref=aymt_homepage_panel

Bali Pulendran Nature The cell menagerie: human immune profiling

· http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v525/n7569/full/525409a.html

Bhagirath Majmudar Emory Magazine Coda: Counting Stars Bhagirath Majmudar reflects on a life in medicine

· http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_MAGAZINE/issues/2015/summer/register/coda.html

Eileen Burd CAP Today Carbapenem-resistant bacteria

· http://www.captodayonline.com/carbapenem-resistance-advice-frontline/

Daniel Kalman PBS Tumor-Fighting Drugs Take on Tuberculosis

· http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/body/tuberculosis-treatments/

Anne Winkler NBC News Ebola Survivor Nancy Writebol Returning to Liberia

· http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ebola-virus-outbreak/ebola-survivor-nancy-writebol-returning-liberia-n312131

Daniel Brat New York Times Brain Tumor’s Genetic Makeup Critical in Treatment, Research Finds

· http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/11/health/brain-tumors-genetic-makeup-critical-in-treatment-research-finds.html?smid=tw-

Immunologist and infectious diseases researcher Professor Aftab Ansari, Ph.D., has been appointed to serve on the NIAID Council, the chief advisory committee of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the NIH. This 18-member blue-ribbon committee meets three times annually to advise the NIAID leadership on policy matters, perform second-level reviews of grant applications and programs, and contribute technical guidance on broad research priorities and direc-tions for the Institute. Dr. Ansari’s four-year term ex-tends through October 2019.

Aftab Ansari, Ph.D.

The American Society for Clin-ical Pathology bestowed its 2015 Philip Levine Award for Outstanding Research on Pro-fessor Sharon Weiss, M.D., rightly acclaiming her as “a pioneer in sarcoma pathology” who was “the first to charac-terize multiple soft tissue pathologic entities.” Dr. Weiss accepted this prestig-ious award at the organiza-tion’s national meeting in Long Beach, California, on October 30. Previously Vice Chair and Director of Anatom-ic Pathology in our Depart-ment and Executive Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, Dr. Weiss continues to direct the renowned diagnostic service in soft tissue pathology that she founded in 1998.

Professor Ifor Williams, M.D., Ph.D., has begun a two-year term as President-Elect of the international Society for Muco-sal Immunology and will rise to become its President in 2017-19. When he’s not busy with his research on antigen sampling in the gut, including groundbreaking recent work on the formation and functions of specialized epithelial cells called M cells and their poten-tial use in oral vaccines, Dr. Williams is also the Medical Director of our busy Clinical Immunology laboratory at Emory University Hospital.

Sharon Weiss, M.D.

Professor and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar Max Cooper, M.D., has been elected as a Foreign Asso-ciate Member of the French Academy of Sciences. Estab-lished by Louis XIV in 1666 to “encourage and protect the spirit of French scientific research” while eschewing discus-sion of “religious and social issues”, this august académie – one of five in the Institut de France -- boasts 384 members and 143 foreign associates, with Dr. Cooper now among the latter. He has been a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences since 1988.

Interesting Links

Max Cooper, M.D., Ph.D.

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To contribute to the next newsletter, send an email to Donna Martin (dmart06@emory.edu) Page 4

December 2015