Last week, Kojo Elenitoba-Johnson, MD, the Peter C. Nowell, M.D., Professor and Director, Center for Personalized Diagnostics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, was the recipient of this year's William L. Gerald Award from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. The William Gerald Award honors a pathologist for his or her innovative research that has provided novel insights in cancer biology, whose career trajectory suggests the potential for outstanding contributions in the years to come, or who is making major research contributions to tumor pathology. The 2019 Gerald Award was presented at the annual MSKCC Pathology Department translational research symposium in March. Dr. Elenitoba-Johnson's keynote Gerald award lecture was on the topic of mass spectrometry as a driver of discovery of novel insights in lymphoma pathogenesis.

The award was established as a tribute in memoriam to the late William Gerald, MD, PhD (1954–2008), a pioneering figure in the genomic analysis of cancer. Gerald was a surgical and molecular pathologist, cancer researcher, and Editorial Board member of The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics. In 2006, he was one of the founding members of the new Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program at MSKCC. His innovative research had a wide-ranging impact on the field, especially in the areas of pediatric oncology, cancer genomics, prostate cancer research, and others.
Previous recipients of the Gerald Award include:

• Arul Chinnaiyan, MD, PhD, the S. P. Hicks Endowed Professor of Pathology at the University of Michigan Medical School (2014)
• David Huntsman, MD, the Dr. Chew Wei Memorial Professor of Gynaecologic Oncology at The University of British Columbia (2016)
• Adrienne Flanagan, MB, BCh, FRCPath, PhD, OBE, Head of Department of Pathology, UCL Cancer Institute, United Kingdom (2017)
• A. John Iafrate, MD, PhD, the Austin L. Vickery, Jr. Professor of Pathology and Director, Center for Integrated Diagnostics, Harvard Medical School (2018)