Speaker Biographies

Marilyn M. Bui, MD, PhD, FCAP is a Senior Member in the Department of Pathology at Moffitt Cancer Center (Moffitt) in Tampa, FL. Dr. Bui serves as the Scientific Director of the Analytic Microscopy Core and the Section Head of Bone & Soft Tissue Pathology. She is also a Professor and the Fellowship Program Director of Cytopathology at the University of South Florida (USF) Morsani College of Medicine. She strives to deliver the best possible patient care by combining her expertise in bone and soft tissue pathology, cytopathology, biomarker testing, and digital pathology/AI. She continuously discovers new knowledge through her research which is evidenced by being an inventor and by being the study pathologist for multiple research grants. She has received patents in digital pathology and cancer diagnostics. She has published over 185 peer-reviewed articles, 24 book chapters and 3 books. Dr. Bui is an award-winning educator and mentor. Dr. Bui believes that service in professional societies is an important mechanism to help influence policies and standards to improve the quality of patient care in a broader sense. She serves on committees organizing national meetings on pathology education. She has frequently lectured both nationally and internationally, including being keynote speaker. She is instrumental in developing the Digital Pathology Association’s Digital Anatomic Pathology Academy, a cloud-based whole slide image educational resource. She is the creator and co-editor of The Healing Art of Pathology published by the College of American Pathologists (CAP). The artwork and stories presented in the book celebrate the courage of patients, the compassion of physicians, and the strength of the human spirit. Dr. Bui is the pathologist member of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network Soft Tissue Sarcoma Panel. She is the editorial board member of multiple journals. She is the President of the Chinese American Pathologists Association. She was the President of the Digital Pathology Association (2019) and the President of Medical Staff of Moffitt (2018-2020). She currently chairs and has chaired multiple committees of the CAP. Dr. Bui has earned several national awards including the 2019 CAP Distinguished Patient Care Award.

Medical Doctor (2003) by the Medical Faculty of The University of Porto with specialization in Pathology since 2011, Catarina Eloy is, since 2013, the Head of the Pathology Laboratory of Ipatimup Diagnostics, and Affiliated Professor at Medical Faculty of University of Porto since 2015. Researcher since 2006 at the Cancer signaling & metabolism of i3S/Ipatimup, Catarina Eloy has a Ph.D. in Thyroid cancer since 2012 by the Medical Faculty of The University of Porto. With more than 70 publications, 3 academic and scientific awards/distinctions, since 2020 Catarina Eloy also serves as President of the European Society for Digital and Integrative Pathology.

Filippo Fraggetta was born in Catania (Italy) in 1970; he graduated in Medicine (1994) and became surgical pathologist in 1998. He is actually the Head of the Pathology unit at Gravina Hospital in Caltagirone. This Pathology unit is fully tracked and fully digital with histological WSI used for primary histological diagnosis. He is Vice President of the Italian Society of Pathology and Chair of the Scientific Committee of the ESDIP (European Society for Digital and Integrative Pathology). He strongly believes in the benefits of Digital Pathology and in the real world application of the digital pathology including the use of AI tool in routine. He is also author of several papers in the field of digital pathology

Matthew G Hanna, MD is the Director of Digital Pathology Informatics at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He is an Assistant Attending of Breast pathology and Informatics at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where he completed his Oncologic Pathology fellowship training. Prior appointments include being a Clinical Instructor of Pathology Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also completed his Pathology Informatics fellowship. He completed his residency training at The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Dr Hanna serves as a member on the CAP Informatics Committee and served as a junior editor for the Journal of Pathology Informatics. He has strong interests in clinical and pathology informatics, computational pathology, and breast pathology.

Matthew G. Hanna, MD, Pathologist; Director, Digital Pathology Informatics, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

Lewis Hassell is currently the endowed Professor of Excellence in Pathology at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, and former director of Anatomic Pathology. He recently returned from a 3-year leave of absence during which he worked in Vietnam in a variety of humanitarian, educational and religious affairs as the volunteer leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints there. He is a past board member of APF, CAP and DPA, and past president of the CAP Foundation. Before re-entering academia he practiced for 17 years with Dahl Chase Pathology in Maine and for four years in Northern California. Dr. Hassell is keenly interested in developing pathology capacity and diagnostic quality in low-resource settings, in leadership development, and practice management issues. Together with Michael Talbert and Jane Pine Wood, he helped author and edit“Pathology Practice Management: A Case Based Approach.” He is the father of three above average children and ten “destined for greatness” grandchildren, all thanks to his eternal companion, Mary Bliss Finlayson.

Dr. Jason Hipp, MD/PhD is a board-certified pathologist with fellowship training in pathology informatics, and AI/machine/deep learning experience. He joined AZ in April, 2019 and is currently leading the Pathology Data Science & Innovation group and either is developing or applying disruptive digital technologies to identify new biomarkers and drug mechanism of actions.

Dr. Zoltan Laszik is a renal pathologist and the director of digital and computational pathology at the University of California in San Francisco. His research focuses on tissue sparing technology applications including development and deployment of in situ multiplexing technologies and gene expression profiling in the field of renal and transplant pathology.

Dr. Joe Lennerz, MD, PhD, serves as the Chief Scientific Officer at BostonGene, overseeing product lifecycle management, data optimization, and regulatory science initiatives, crucial to the company's position as a leading AI-driven solutions provider in molecular-genetic and immune profiling. Previously, he held leadership roles at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, focusing on personalized diagnostics integration. With MD and PhD from the University of Erlangen, Germany, and dual board certification, Dr. Lennerz's expertise spans regulatory science, molecular-genetic biomarkers, and healthcare sustainability, exemplified by his pioneering work in FDA precision studies and contributions to academia and personalized medicine advancement.

Christina has spent the last 25+ years creating more than 300 events hosted by CHI. She is the creator and driving force behind the PEGS Summit, now in its 18th year, and the Molecular Medicine Tri-conference, now in its 29th year, and has identified and developed emerging topics including bispecific antibodies, genomics, molecular diagnostics, phage display, point-of-care diagnostics, bioinformatics and many more. Christina emphasizes the importance of bringing together the academic and industrial sectors to create environments where innovation is fostered and commercial applications are advanced.

Anant Madabhushi, PhD, is the Donnell Institute Professor of biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Cleveland and director of the university’s Center for Computational Imaging and Personalized Diagnostics (CCIPD). He is also a Research Scientist at the Louis Stokes Cleveland Veterans Administration (VA) Medical Center and has affiliate appointments both at University Hospitals and Cleveland Clinic. He holds secondary appointments in the departments of Biomedical Engineering, Urology, Radiology, Pathology, Radiation Oncology, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and Gen Med Sciences at CWRU. Madabhushi’s team at CCIPD is developing and applying novel Artificial Intelligence and machine learning approaches for the diagnosis, prognosis and prediction of therapy response for a variety of diseases including several different types of cancers, cardiovascular disease, kidney and eye disease. The Center is located in Cleveland’s unique medical ecosystem, an extensive clinical network within which it boasts numerous successful collaborations including with the Cleveland Clinic and the Cole Eye Institute, University Hospitals, the VA Louis Stokes Medical Center, MetroHealth, and the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center at CWRU. Madabhushi has more than 100 patents either issued or pending in the areas of medical image analysis, computer-aided diagnosis, and computer vision, more than 60 of which are issued. He was responsible for more than 10 percent of all patents awarded to Case Western Reserve University in 2017, 2018 and 2019. The author of more than 400 peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers, Madabhushi is a sought after lecturer who has delivered more than 325 talks around the world. His efforts as a professor and researcher have gained international attention in the field of biomedical engineering, garnering him several awards. Most notably, Madabhushi is a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biomedical Engineering (AIMBE), a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). In 2015, he made Crain’s Cleveland Business magazine’s “Forty under 40” list. In 2019 and 2020, Madabhushi was named to The Pathologist's Power List, a list of 100 most inspiring professionals in pathology and laboratory medicine. In 2020, he received the Diekhoff Award for Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring at CWRU. Madabhushi’s work on developing “smart computers for identifying lung cancer patients who will benefit from chemotherapy” was ranked as one of the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2018 by Prevention Magazine. In 2019, Nature Magazine called him out as one of five scientists pursuing truly offbeat and innovative approaches in cancer research. His work on using AI for addressing health disparities, especially in identifying differences in appearance of prostate cancer between black and white men, received national attention in 2020. Madabhushi has secured more than $60 million in grant funding and co-founded two companies, Vascuvis Inc. (now Elucid Bioimaging) and IbRiS Inc., which was acquired by Inspirata in 2015. He has been involved in several sponsored research and industry partnerships with medical imaging and pharmaceutical companies. In addition, more than 15 technologies developed by Madabhushi’s team have been licensed.

Dr. Liron Pantanowitz is a Professor in the Department of Pathology and the Director of Anatomical Pathology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI, USA. He received his medical degree from the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. He completed his anatomical and clinical pathology residency training at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard in Boston. He subsequently completed a hematopathology fellowship at Harvard and Cytopathology fellowship at Tufts. He is also board certified by the American Board of Pathology in clinical informatics and completed his MHA at Ohio University. Dr. Pantanowitz is an Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Pathology Informatics. He is a past president and current council member of the Association of Pathology Informatics, president-elect of the American Society of Cytopathology, and a member of the Digital Pathology Association board of directors. He is widely published in the field of pathology informatics and cytopathology. His research interests include digital pathology and artificial intelligence.

Dr. Anil Parwani is a Professor of Pathology at The Ohio State University. He serves as the Vice Chair and Director of Anatomical Pathology. Dr. Parwani is also the Director of Pathology Informatics and Director of the Digital Pathology Shared Resource at The James Cancer Hospital. His research is focused on diagnostic and prognostic markers in bladder and prostate cancer, and molecular classification of renal cell carcinoma. Dr. Parwani has expertise in the area of surgical pathology, viral vaccines and immunology, and pathology informatics including designing quality assurance tools, bio banking informatics, clinical and research data integration, applications of whole slide imaging, digital imaging, telepathology, image analysis and lab automation. Dr. Parwani has authored over 300 peer-reviewed articles in major scientific journals and several books and book chapters. Dr. Parwani is the Editor-in-chief of Diagnostic Pathology and one of the Editors of the Journal of Pathology Informatics.

Dr. Picarsic is a board-certified pediatric pathologist, Co-Director of the Histiocytosis Center and Director of Digital Pathology at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Dr. Picarsic’s main academic interests are centered on the pathobiology and molecular drivers of histiocytic neoplasms, a rare group of white blood cell disorders that affect both pediatric and adult patients. She sits on the Executive Board of the Histiocyte Society as the Society’s Treasurer, along with membership on both the Scientific Committee and the Rare Histiocytic Disorders Committee. She was the recent past Chair for the Society of Pediatric Pathology (SPP) Slide Survey Online Subcommittee (2018-2021), in which she directed the SPP’s online educational program that provides 18 pediatric/perinatal digitized whole slides images with CME/SAMs online case content each year for members. Dr. Picarsic is a member of the Digital Pathology Association, the Association for Pathology Informatics, and associate member of the Midwestern Consortium Workshop for Computational Pathology. Dr. Picarsic has published on the role of digital pathology in pediatric pathology for both novel educational platforms and in pediatric transplant heart pathology. She is a Forty under 40 honoree of the American Society for Clinical Pathology (ASCP) and was the 2018 recipient of the Nesbit Award by the Histiocyte Society.

Joel Saltz is a Digital Pathology pioneer having worked for the past twenty five years in the development of digital Pathology whole slide image software, methods, tools and algorithms. He is a boarded Clinical Pathologist, holds an MD-PhD in Computer Science from Duke, completed a Clinical Pathology residency from Hopkins and has founded Biomedical Informatics departments at Stony Brook, Emory and Ohio State. Dr. Saltz is Chair and Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Informatics as well as Vice Chair of Pathology at Stony Brook and holds the Cherith endowed chair.

Dr Shakya is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Centre for Immunotherapy and Vaccine Development and Tumour Immunology Laboratory at the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Brisbane, Australia. She is currently using multiplexed fluorescence immunohistochemistry and deep learning-based automated image analysis tools to study the impact of the tumour microenvironment on clinical response to immunotherapy. Dr Shakya's research goal is to develop tissue-based spatial biomarkers to enable a personalized approach to disease management and therapeutics decisions and improve patient outcomes. Dr Shakya is also an ambassador for the DeNovo Software company based in California, United States. Dr Shakya provides scientific and technical knowledge about the company's flagship project, a premier flow and image cytometry data analysis software. Dr Shakya is a Co-founder and board member of Nexus Institute of Research and Innovation (NIRI), Nepal where she is leading projects on clinical adoption of digital pathology in hospitals of Nepal. Dr Shakya is passionate about advocating the value of digital pathology, automation of pathology workflow for primary diagnosis and development and clinical adoption of artificial intelligence-based digital image analysis software in pathology.

Dr. Singh is a Professor in Dermatology and Pathology at Northwell Health, New York. He directs the Dermatopathology Section and is the Associate Chair of Digital Pathology. He is board certified in pathology and dermatopathology and board eligible for Clinical Informatics. He is the Founder of PathPresenter, an online digital platform that has 225,000+ users in 175+ countries and is used by multiple academic departments, private pathology groups and organizations in the US and all over the world. (https://pathpresenter.ai/) Dr. Singh has served on various committees both at the University of Pittsburgh and at Mt. Sinai as well as national societies such as the ASDP, AAD, DPA and CAP. He has served as the Chair of the American Society of Dermatopathology Informatics Committee. He currently serves on the Sulzberger Grant Committee of the AAD and on the Editorial Board of JAAD. In 2013, he was awarded the Sulzberger Grant from the American Academy of Dermatology for developing interactive tools for teaching of dermatology and dermatopathology. He is the Editor, creator and developer of the app, mydermpath+ and educational platforms-wiydx.com. He also serves as a member of the Editorial Board of the WHO for Classification of tumors, 5th Edition and the Board of Digital Pathology Association. He was nominated to the Pathologist Power List 2020.

Hamid R. Tizhoosh is a Professor in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Waterloo since 2001, leading the KIMIA Lab (Laboratory for Knowledge Inference in Medical Image Analysis). KIMIA Lab researchers investigate the use of artificial intelligence methods for searching in large archives of medical images. Since 1993, Dr. Tizhoosh's research activities encompass artificial intelligence, computer vision, and medical imaging. He has developed algorithms for medical image filtering, segmentation, and search. He is the author of two books, 14 book chapters, and more than 150 journal and conference papers. Dr. Tizhoosh has long-standing extensive industrial activities and has worked with numerous companies. He is also a Faculty Affiliate to the Vector Institute, Toronto, Canada, and a member of the Waterloo AI Institute, University of Waterloo, Canada.

Dr. Darren Treanor MB BSc (Computing) MD PhD is a consultant pathologist at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, honorary professor of pathology at the University of Leeds, adjunct professor in digital pathology at Linköping University, Sweden and Digital Pathology Lead for the Royal College of Pathologists. He is a clinical director of the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare at Leeds. Dual qualified in medicine and computing, Dr. Treanor runs the Leeds virtual pathology project, with a multi-disciplinary team working in digital pathology research and innovation. He has co-authored over 100 papers in the medical and computing literature, most of them concerned with the application or development of digital pathology in clinical and preclinical areas. He is director of the National Pathology Imaging Co-operative, a >£40m Industry-NHS collaboration to deploy digital pathology across 22 sites in the North of England, covering a population of 6 million patients, and create two national systems across a further 20 hospitals to support sarcoma and paediatric tumour diagnosis. NPIC will use this infrastructure to develop and test artificial intelligence systems to diagnose cancer. At Linköping his research includes the clinical adoption and validation of digital pathology in a fully digitised department, and the development and implementation of AI. Other research activities include 3D tissue reconstruction, image analysis, colour measurement/ correction and the use of digital pathology in education and training. Further details of the Leeds digital pathology project are available at http://www.virtualpathology.leeds.ac.uk and npic.ac.uk

Thomas received his PhD from the University of Helsinki Medical School in Finland. He completed a post-doctoral EMBO fellowship at DFCI in Boston, on genomics and transcriptional regulation of breast and prostate cancers. Tom joined Aiforia to advance the potential pathology, big data, and artificial intelligence. At Aiforia Tom works with advanced Pharma and Clinical Projects to bring the newest tools and solutions to the forefront of diagnostics and therapeutics R&D. 

Dr Bethany Williams is a Fellow at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and the University of Leeds, and the Lead for Training, Validation and PPI at the National Pathology Imaging Co-Operative in the United Kingdom. She is a thought leader in digital pathology patient safety, evidence based digital pathology training and validation, and her scientific papers on digital diagnostic accuracy form the basis of the Royal College of Pathologists’ guidelines for safe, effective digital deployment. Her body of research earned her the Pathological Society’s medal for research impact, and she is regularly invited to speak at international conferences as an authority on the digital pathology evidence base, practical deployment and patient safety.