2021 API Council Election Winners
President-Elect:
Toby C. Cornish, MD, PhD
Medical Director of Informatics
Associate Professor
University of Colorado School of Medicine
University of Colorado School of Medicine
Dr. Cornish is an Associate Professor of Pathology at The University of Colorado School of Medicine where he practices gastrointestinal pathology and serves as the Medical Director of Informatics for the department of pathology and Medical Director of the LIS for the UCHealth system. His interests include histologic image analysis, digital pathology in education and clinical practice, computational pathology and mobile applications for pathology education. Dr. Cornish has co-developed software packages for biomarker quantitation including TMAJ/FrIDA, PIP, and HPASubC. Dr. Cornish is the co-author of several educational apps for the iPad: The Johns Hopkins Atlas of Pancreatic Pathology, The Johns Hopkins Atlas of Pancreatic Cytopathology, The Johns Hopkins Flashcards App and the iCarebook for Pancreatic Cancer, and he is a series editor for the ongoing Johns Hopkins Atlases of Pathology series of apps. He was named to The Pathologist magazine's Power List 2020 for Big Breakthroughs, serves on the Editorial Board for Modern Pathology and is an Associate Editor for the American Journal of Clinical Pathology.
Secretary:
Joseph Rudolf, MD
Assistant Professor, Department of Pathology, University of Utah School of Medicine
Medical Director, Automated Core Laboratory, ARUP Laboratories
Joseph Rudolf, MD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology at the University of Utah School of Medicine and the Medical Director of the Automated Core Laboratory at ARUP Laboratories. Prior to joining the University of Utah faculty, he served as the Chief Medical Informatics Officer for Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at the University of Minnesota and Fairview Health Services in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He earned his medical degree (2012) from the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, Washington. He completed his residency training in Clinical Pathology (2015) and fellowship in Clinical Informatics (2017) at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. His clinical and research interests focus on the intersection of informatics and clinical operations including clinical decision support, utilization management, and reporting and analytics. He is also passionate about clinical process improvement and initiatives to support quality and safety.
Program Committee Chair-Elect:
Thomas JS Durant, MD
Assistant Professor; Yale University School of Medicine, Department of Laboratory Medicine
Medical Director; Chemical Pathology Laboratory, Yale-New Haven Hospital
Medical Director; Laboratory ITS, Yale-New Haven Health
Associate Director, ACGME Chemical Pathology Fellowship, Laboratory Medicine
Dr. Durant is an Assistant Professor of Laboratory Medicine and informatics researcher at the Yale School of Medicine. He is the medical Director of Chemical Pathology and Laboratory Information Technology (IT) at Yale-New Haven Hospital, and the Associate Director for the ACGME Chemical Pathology Fellowship. He conducts applied laboratory medicine research with a pragmatic focus on quality care initiatives, laboratory outcomes, statistics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence applications in the context of pathology and clinical medicine. His primary research interests are in clinical informatics and using novel data management technology to better derive insight into the quality and overall operations for laboratories and patient care. Ongoing projects involve the investigation of stream processing of interface data for the purposes of automated sample identification for subsequent biobanking. Machine learning related projects include the use of 'very deep' convolutional neural networks for automated classification of digital images acquired in the clinical laboratory.
Membership Committee Chair:
Tushar Patel, MD
Assistant Professor of Clinical Pathology
Director of Pathology Informatics
Director of Pathology Informatics
University of Illinois at Chicago
Dr. Patel is a practicing pathologist at University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Hospital & Health Sciences System in Chicago, IL. His clinical service focus is medical renal and transplant pathology. Dr. Patel also serves as an Associate Chief Health Information Officer, the Director of Pathology Informatics, and the Program Director of the Clinical Informatics fellowship at UIC. As a member of the College of American Pathologists, Dr. Patel served on the Pathology Electronic Reporting (PERT) Committee from 2011-2016. He is a member of Illinois Society of Pathology, and serves as the Secretary & Treasurer, Chair of the Membership Committee, and Chair of the Social Media Taskforce. Dr. Patel is also currently a member of the API Membership Committee.
Training and Education Committee Co-Chair:
Amrom Obstfeld, MD
Assistant Professor of Clinical Pathology and Laboratory Medicine
University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine
Amrom Obstfeld MD, PhD, is the Medical Director of the Division of Pathology Informatics as well as the Hematology Laboratory at Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia. After receiving his MD and PhD degrees from the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, he went on to train in Clinical Pathology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to his duties within the Hematology Laboratory, Dr. Obstfeld's clinical responsibilities include leading the development of analytic tools to aid in laboratory quality management, administration, and operation, and interfacing with other groups throughout the hospital on informatics initiatives. His research focuses on utilizing clinical and pre-clinical laboratory data sets for predicting diagnosis and prognosis using statistical and machine learning techniques. Dr. Obstfeld plays a major role in designing and implementing educational experiences for pathology trainees and faculty at the University of Pennsylvania within the areas of clinical and pathology informatic
Technical Standards Committee Co-Chairs:
Noah G. Hoffman, MD, PhD
Associate Professor
Head of the Informatics Division of the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology (DLMP)
University of Washington, Seattle, WA
Dr. Hoffman directs the staff responsible for maintaining the Laboratory Information System and physical computing infrastructure for the department. He also plays a direct role in the custom development of software and infrastructure supporting many facets of laboratory operations, data management, and clinical assays.
Dr. Hoffman's primary research interest is in the development and application of bioinformatic tools to perform nucleic acid sequence-based identification of microbiota in both basic research and clinical settings. He is also co-director of the DLMP NGS Analytics Laboratory: in this role, he supervises and advises on the development of bioinformatics pipelines and scientific computing infrastructure supporting clinical assays.
Dr. Hoffman completed his MD and PhD in Microbiology and Immunology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2005, and completed residency training in Clinical Pathology at the University of Washington in 2008, where he has since remained in faculty roles.
Peter Gershkovich, MD
Director of Pathology Informatics
Research Scientist
Yale University School of Medicine
Dr. Gershkovich is a Research Scientist and the Director of Pathology Informatics at Yale Medical School Pathology Department. He joined the Department in 2004 shortly after completing his fellowship training at Yale Center for Medical Informatics. Dr. Gershkovich spent last sixteen years leading the development and implementation of novel systems directed towards improving quality and efficiency of Pathology Services at Yale while minimizing the cost of systems maintenance. He is the lead architect and developer of software that deals with systems integration and interoperability, clinical workflow, analytics, and information retrieval.
His large-scale projects include Hermes – an interface engine that supports HL7 and ASMT exchange standards for communication between system and robotic instruments, the Downstream – an application for molecular pathologists to enable rapid evaluation of tumor DNA sequencing results in cancer patients by providing access to external and internal knowledge base, TQuest – an application that helps to find targeted treatment for discovered tumor DNA variants, RELAY – Remote Electronic Labs at Yale – a system that allowed external clients to order tests, have access to results, and ultimately integrate this with their EMR systems, FSLink – a unique software that improves the speed and clarity of communication by linking Pathology and surgical operating rooms at Yale, Pathology Portal that gives Pathologists and integrated view of current pathological cases with context sensitive access to EMR data and historic material across multiple systems.
Dr. Gershkovich is also involved in teaching Informatics to pathology residents.