MY JOURNEY to PATHOLOGY

You know about my personal background (My Background). But how did I end up in Pathology? Here is the path.

That old house that I described in My Background and that I grew up in was filled with mid to late 19th C and early 20th C medical instruments, along with pharmaceutical tools and medical textbooks. As a child I was fascinated by these. My family strongly encouraged me to study medicine. The problem was, my curiosity led me to Physics. I entered the University of Texas at Austin as a Physics major with a pre-med option. I was accepted to med school in 1976. At the same time, I was awarded a Marshall Scholarship for graduate school in the United Kingdom. I accepted the Marshall and completed my PhD in Biophysics, developing mathematical models of membrane bound reaction systems. After completing two post-doctoral fellowships in the US, I went to work for Exxon Research and Engineering Company where I developed the basis for their refinery optimization model for fluidized catalytic cracking. I moved from Exxon to Mobil Oil Research Company (and now they are under the same umbrella!) I continued work in mathematical modeling of reaction processes, and designed an experimental unit to study the kinetics at various time points.

However, my interest in medicine persisted and I decided to attend medical school. The one regret I have is that the board exams for a medical student graduating would have been much simpler in 1980 compared to 1994! By a curious twist of fate, I ended up attending the same medical school as my grandmother Dr. Headley Trevino de Edgerton. After graduating in 1994 I completed a year of Internal Medicine. While this has been a very valuable experience for me as a witness to being a consumer of laboratory data, I was drawn back to pathology. It had been my favorite subject in med school, and I continue it to be part of my continuum of working with mechanisms of disease. I completed by AP/CP residency and Surgical Pathology at the University of Pennsylvania, including a month at the NIH with Edison Liu and a month of breast pathology at Vanderbilt with David Page. From my training I went on to work at Vanderbilt, H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center, and the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Currently I am a Professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.

A common thread in my studies has been the collection of and quality assurance in data, modeling processes, coding computer simulations of these processes, and ultimately pattern analysis. My tools have been laboratory instruments, computers, computational algorithms, and of course my microscope. Another common thread in my career is giving back to the communities that have been a part of my journey is very important to me. I recently participated in a talk to physics students at UT Austin about opportunities in medicine, and I continued to work with the Marshall Scholarship Alumni Organization (Prince Charles was our honorary patron!) and as member and then Chair of a regional Marshall Scholarship Selection Committee, most recently in Houston. This affords me connection to the UK via the Consul General in Houston, and you can see a photo of the Marshall Committee Chairs in 2019 by the Xmas tree at the British Embassy. And now I want to give back to the College of American Pathologists as a member of the Board of Governors!

My resume can be found here.