Message from Dr. David Roth, Simon Flexner Professor and Chair:

It is with great appreciation and distinctly mixed emotions that I inform the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and the larger Penn Medicine community of the retirement of Zoe Zampana, the Executive Assistant to the Chair and Academic Recruitment Coordinator, effective February 1, 2018.

I am most grateful to Zoe for her dedicated service to Penn and especially for the six years we have worked together. Her superlative administrative abilities, calm demeanor, wry sense of humor, and impeccably sound judgment have been extraordinary assets to me and to our entire Department. Zoe has served in the Office of the Chair as Executive Assistant and as a trusted advisor to four consecutive Chairs of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine since 1997, starting with the late Dr. Leonard Jarett, and then for Drs. Mark Tykocinski and John Tomaszewski, and me. She has also served as the primary liaison and facilitator for all interactions with the administrative staff and 150+ faculty members of the Department, as well as the School of Medicine, CPUP, HUP, and other internal and external entities.

I am sure that everyone receiving this announcement will agree with me that working with Zoe has been a privilege and a pleasure and that her talents will be sorely missed. She has been a reliable colleague, a key ambassador of the Department to the greater Penn community, a source of insight for generations of trainees and co-workers in the Department, and the go-to person for all faculty members in need of assistance. Moreover, Zoe brought to the position a keen and extraordinary understanding of the complexities of a large academic medical center. Indeed, she started her career at Penn as an administrative secretary in the CPUP Executive Office, followed by a position in Development, and then in Public Relations/Development at the Wistar Institute. She became a Clinical Research Coordinator in Penn Medicine's Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, then joined the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in 1997.

To ensure a smooth and uninterrupted transition in the executive team for the Chair's Office, Zoe has been working closely with Laura Pritchard in her new role as the Executive Assistant to the Chair of the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine since early December.

Please join me in thanking Zoe for her two decades of exemplary service here at Penn and bid her farewell as she embarks on her new adventures in retirement, where she can "get some well-deserved rest" while she is "still young," as she put it to me. (And, to her credit, she had apprised me that this day of her retirement would come, as she reminded me every year in January since I took office!)  
 
David B. Roth, MD, PhD
Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine