Nineteen faculty members join the Department in the Anatomic Pathology, Laboratory Medicine, Experimental Pathology Divisions and at CHOP.

Laboratory Medicine Division:

Julianne Qualtieri, MD
Medical Director, Clinical Flow Cytometry Lab

Anatomic Pathology Division:

Dr. Daniele Fortuna received her bachelor degree in mathematics from Holy Family University in Philadelphia, PA in 2008 and received her medical degree from Jefferson Medical College in 2013. She completed her training in Anatomic and Clinical Pathology at Thomas Jefferson University and in Gastrointestinal and Liver Pathology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. During her residency, Dr. Fortuna received the Distinguished Abstract Award from the AACC’s National Academy of Clinical Biochemistry.  She also received the Excellence in Teaching Award and the Distinguished Scholar Award during her residency training. Dr. Fortuna is an exceptionally well-trained surgical pathologist and will participate as an Academic Clinician faculty member in the Gastrointestinal and Liver Pathology services which encompass a significant fraction of the volume of clinical diagnostic effort in the Surgical Pathology Section.

Dr. Jalal Jalaly received his Doctor of Medicine and Surgery degree from the College of Medicine at King Saud University in Riyadh Saudi Arabia in 2009. Following an Internship year, Dr. Jalaly moved to the United States where he received a Master’s of Science in Biotechnology from Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Albany NY in 2012.  In 2016, he completed residency in Anatomic and Clinical Pathology in the Department of Pathology and Immunology at Washington University/Barnes Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, MO. In 2017, he completed a Surgical Pathology Fellowship also at Washington University and most recently completed a fellowship in Cytopathology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in. During his residency and surgical pathology fellowship, Dr. Jalaly was voted as resident/fellow of the month on multiple occasions. Dr. Jalal is an exceptionally well-trained surgical and cytopathologist. He will participate as an Academic Clinician faculty member in the Head and Neck and Endocrine Pathology as well as Cytopathology sections.

Dr. John Wojcik received his BS degree from the University of Notre Dame in 2004, followed by his MD/PhD degree from the University of Chicago, Pritzker School of Medicine in 2012.  During his MD/PhD training, he was the recipient of the Outstanding Performance Award in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 2011 and won the Leon O. Jacobson Basic Science Prize for the most Meritorious Basic Science Research performed by an MD/PhD student. His graduate work resulted in nine publications including a first author paper in 2010 in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology and a first author paper in 2016 in Journal of Biological Chemistry. In 2012, Dr. Wojcik began residency training in Anatomic Pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital and in 2014, he finished his training in Anatomic Pathology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and then completed a Bone and Soft Tissue Pathology Fellowship at Pennsylvania Hospital/HUP where he was the recipient of a teaching award by the residents. During his clinical training, Dr. Wojcik was involved in manuscripts related to the clinical aspects of bone and soft tissue pathology including two first authored papers in American Journal of Surgical Pathology.   His more recent work for which he was awarded an Abramson Cancer Center’s Paul Calabresi Career Development Award for Clinical Oncology K12, was under the mentorship of Dr. Benjamin Garcia and concentrated on mass spectrometry of malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumors and the identification of proteomic and epigenetic changes upon PRC2 loss.  Dr. Wojcik has refined proteomic analysis from formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded tissues.  He plans to continue this work in the evaluation of soft tissue neoplasms and to use this methodology collaboratively with investigators in the PSOM and will participate as a Clinician Educator faculty member in Bone and Soft Tissue and Gynecological Pathology subspecialties in the Surgical Pathology section.

Experimental Pathology and Immunobiology Division:

Sydney Shaffer, MD, PhD, received her BS (Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering) from Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010, and her PhD (Bioengineering) from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016 and her MD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018. She worked as a postdoc in Junwei Shi’s Lab at Penn. Her research is focused on understanding how differences between single-cells generate phenotypes such as drug resistance, oncogenesis, differentiation, and invasion, using cutting-edge technologies including high-throughput imaging, single-molecule RNA FISH, fluorescent protein tagging, CRISPR/Cas9 screening, and flow cytometry to investigate rare single-cell phenomena.

Vijay Bhoj, MD, PhD, holds MD degrees from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, 2010, and a PhD (Immunology), from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, 2010. He was a Clinical Pathology resident at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania from 2010-2013 and a Postdoctoral researcher in Transfusion Medicine, the University of Pennsylvania, from 2013 to 2018. His expertise lies in the area of cellular immunotherapy. In particular, the preclinical development of immunotherapy that employ engineered immuno-receptors (e.g. chimeric antigen receptors) for the treatment of cancer and of non-malignant conditions such as autoimmunity and transplant rejection.

Pennsylvania Hospital:
Abul Ala Syed Rifat Mannan, MBBS, MD

The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia:

Tatiana Akimova, MD, PhD
Ana Maria Cardenas Caicedo, PhD
Matthew Dulik, PhD
Stephan Kadauke, MD, PhD
Lan Lin, PhD
Stephen Master, MD, PhD
Jill Murrell, PhD
Angela Viaene, MD, PhD
Kai Wang, PhD
Yi Xing, PhD

The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia Tenure Track:

We are pleased to announce that Will Bailis, PhD, will join the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in the Division of Protective Immunity based at CHOP as an Assistant Professor in the tenure track. Will received his Ph.D. from Penn where he did his thesis work with Warren Pear, studying the mechanisms underlying how the transcription factor NOTCH directs T helper cell differentiation and fate. He then joined Richard Flavell’s lab at Yale where he has taken a variety of systems biology approaches to explore metabolism in T cell fate and function. He developed a CRISPR screen to test the role of metabolic enzymes and transporters that impact T helper differentiation. Will’s immunometabolism work will fit well with ongoing initiatives in cancer immunotherapy, immunology and the Center for Mitochondrial and Epigenetic Medicine. Will's lab will be on the 12th floor of the Abramson building.

We are pleased to announce that Joe Zackular, PhD, will join the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in the Division of Protective Immunity based at CHOP as an Assistant Professor in the tenure track. Joe received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan where he studied how the gut microbiome modulates colon tumorigenesis in the lab of Patrick Schloss. He then joined the lab of Eric Skaar at Vanderbilt where he studied C. difficile and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus, using genetic, immunological and biochemical approaches to dissect how these microbiota collaborate and interface with the host immune system.  Joe’s work will dovetail nicely with ongoing initiatives in the PennCHOP Microbiome Center, the Institute for Immunology as well as research within the Divisions of Infectious Diseases and Gastroenterology.  Joe's lab will be on the 12th floor of the Abramson building.