Zubair W. Baloch, MD, PhD, is the recipient of the American Society of Cytopathology 2022 President's Award. Initiated in 1992, this award is presented annually to a pathologist and/or cytotechnologist in recognition of contributions to the ASC. The ASC will present all awards on Saturday, November 19th at the annual meeting. Dr. Baloch has authored more than 200 peer reviewed publications in leading pathology journals on the subject of endocrine and head and neck pathology; and book chapters and monographs. He has delivered numerous lectures, and educational courses both at the national and international meetings including ASC, USCAP, ASCP, CAP, EFCS, ECC and IAP. Dr. Baloch has coauthored 3 books and has served as co-editor of the most recent “Milan System for Reporting Salivary Gland Cytopathology”. He has also served as the chair of the terminology and morphologic criteria committee of the 2007 NCI sponsored thyroid FNA initiative which led to the development of “Bethesda Thyroid FNA Classification Scheme”. Dr. Baloch also served on the international panel which recommended the renaming of encapsulated follicular variant of papillary thyroid carcinoma to non-invasive follicular tumor with papillary like nuclear features (NIFTP).

Malay Haldar, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and Assistant Investigator, Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute, is the 2022 recipient of the Michael S. Brown New Investigator Research Award. Established in honor of Nobel Laureate Michael S. Brown, a 1966 Penn School of Medicine alumnus, the award recognizes emerging faculty investigators engaged in innovative discoveries. The award recognizes achievement by an emerging faculty investigator engaged in innovative discoveries. Nominations are not limited to a particular biomedical research discipline.  Competitive nominees will have accomplished a significant body of work as an independent investigator at Penn. Dr. Haldar is a highly innovative physician-scientist who best represents how combining one's clinical activities with a burgeoning research program can uniquely develop impactful and forward-thinking lines of investigation. He has made significant achievements in the fields of sarcoma tumor models and macrophage/dendritic cell biology.

Carl June, MD, the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies at Penn’s Abramson Cancer Center, has been named a 2022 Keio Medical Science Prize Laureate. He is recognized for his pioneering role in the development of CAR T cell therapy for cancer, which uses modified versions of patients’ own immune cells to attack their cancer. The Keio Medical Science Prize is an annual award endowed by Keio University, Japan’s oldest private university, which recognizes researchers who have made an outstanding contribution to the fields of medicine or the life sciences. It is the only prize of its kind awarded by a Japanese university, and eight laureates of this prize have later won the Nobel Prize.

Virginia M.-Y. Lee, PhD, Director of the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research (CNDR), was named a 2022 Clarivate Citation Laureate for her contribution to the identification of TDP-43, a pathological signature of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), and for other contributions to the study of neurodegenerative diseases. Citation Laureates are selected on the basis of data analyses in the Web of Science, an online resource reflecting the indexed contents of more than 34,000 scientific journals and other source materials. Of particular interest are authors of extremely highly cited papers (those cited more than 1,000 times in the Web of Science Core Collection). An exceptionally high citation record is a mark of a researcher's community-wide influence and acknowledgement of their important foundational work.

Virginia LiVolsi, MD, is the recipient of the Endocrine Pathology Society's Lifetime Achievement Award, given to colleagues who have made extraordinary lifelong contributions to pathology-based study of endocrine disease. Dr. LiVolsi is one of the founding members of Endocrine Pathology Society. In the words of the nomination jury: "We don't believe anyone practicing medicine can mention the word 'thyroid' without thinking of her. Her contributions to pathology are immense in terms of her research, teachings, and dedication to the improvement of pathology organizations; but perhaps she is most cherished for her incredible mentorship."

Donald L. Siegel, PhD, MD, is the 2022 Inductee of the National Blood Foundation (NBF) Hall of Fame from the AABB (Association for the Advancement of Blood & Biotherapies). The AABB Foundation introduced the Hall of Fame in 2007, recognizing a prestigious and select group of Foundation grant recipients who leveraged their early-career grant funding into successful careers in transfusion medicine or biotherapies and who demonstrated exemplary leadership within the field. The Hall of Fame was reinstated in 2015 as an annual recognition In 2007, NBF introduced its Hall of Fame, recognizing a prestigious and select group of NBF grant recipients who leveraged their early-career grant funding into successful careers in transfusion medicine, cellular therapies, or patient blood management and who demonstrate exemplary leadership within the field. The NBF reinstated this important program in 2015 and elects one to three new members annually. Dr. Siegel's research laboratory has been funded in the areas of immunohematology, hemostasis/thrombosis, autoimmunity, and oncology beginning with his receipt of an AABB Foundation grant in 1991. His laboratory focuses on the development of phage display technologies for the discovery of recombinant antibodies relevant to transfusion medicine, benign hematology, infectious diseases, and oncology, particularly for use in the design of targeted therapies such as chimeric antigen receptor T-cells. Currently, Dr. Siegel oversees the development and manufacture of CAR-T cells for 20 investigational trials.

In October 2022, the Alzheimer’s Disease Sequencing Project (ADSP) released a new dataset comprised of 19,456 newly sequenced genomes together with joint genotype calls totaling 36,361 genomes with previously released genomes. The data release via NIAGADS DSS includes sequencing reads in the CRAM file format, individual sample genotype calls in the genomic Variant Call Format (gVCF), and a preview project-level genotype call dataset in the VCF format across all samples, all generated by the Genome Center for Alzheimer’s Disease (GCAD). The project-level VCF is provided as a preview to the full ADSP quality control that will be released in the next few months.

Bruce Levine, PhD, will receive the Precision Medicine World Conference 2023 Luminary Award for Gene-modified Cell Therapies in January. The PMWC 2023 Luminary Award recognizes the recent contributions of prominent figures who have accelerated Precision Medicine into the clinic. Dr. Levine will be honored for his pioneering work in cancer immunotherapy that led to the first FDA-approved gene therapy for leukemia and lymphoma. Dr. Levine conducted the first-in-human adoptive immunotherapy trials including the first use of a lentiviral vector, the first infusions of gene-edited cells, and the first use of lentivirally modified cells to treat cancer. He is co-inventor of the first FDA-approved gene therapy (Kymriah), chimeric antigen receptor T cells for leukemia and lymphoma, licensed to Novartis. Dr. Levine is co-inventor on 30 issued US patents and co-author of >200 manuscripts and book chapters with a Google Scholar citation h-index of 100.

Ping Wang, PhD, DABCC, FAACC, is the recipient of the 2022 Emerging Inventor of the Year Award from the Penn Center for Innovation in recognition of her groundbreaking work in point-of-care diagnostics with rapid, ultra-sensitive biomarker detection technology.