Pathology & Laboratory Medicine occupies a unique niche at the interface of clinical medicine and biomedical science. Since its inception in 1968 under the guidance of founding chair Dr. Edward R. Arquilla, the UCI Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine has been committed to this tradition, and has strived for excellence in the clinical, research, and educational missions of the UCI Health Sciences.

CLINICAL PROGRAMS

The clinical home of the Department is the UCI Medical Center, the only university medical center in Orange County. UCIMC is recognized for its specialized patient care, supported by the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, our Children’s Hospital, the Neuropsychiatric Center, and our Level 1 Trauma Center. Pathology & Laboratory Medicine faculty and staff provide clinical diagnostic services to UCI Health System patients and also provide consultative and referral services to more than 33 hospitals in Orange County and 31 other regional hospitals.

The Division of Anatomic Pathology (Chief: Philip Carpenter, M.D.) includes Surgical Pathology and Cytology (Director: Philip Carpenter, M.D.; Robert Edwards, M.D., Ph.D., Cytopathology Chief: Mai Gu, M.D., Ph.D.; Fritz Lin, M.D., Navneet Narula, M.D., Mark Li-cheng Wu, M.D., Sheila Zhao, M.D., Ph.D., Suzanne Keel, M.D., and Jane Tongson-Ignacio, M.D.), Autopsy Pathology (Philip Carpenter, M.D., Robert Edwards, M.D., Ph.D., Mark Li-cheng Wu, M.D., and Navneet Narula, M.D.), and Neuropathology (Ronald Kim, M.D. and Edwin Monuki, M.D., Ph.D.).

The Division of Clinical Pathology (Chief: TBA) includes Microbiology (Director: Luis de la Maza, M.D., Ph.D. and Ellena Peterson, Ph.D.), Hematopathology (Director: Sheila Zhao, M.D., Ph.D. and Sherif Rezk, M.D.), Chemical Pathology (Interim Director: Sherif Rezk, M.D.), Transfusion Medicine (Director: Irina Knezevic-Maramica, M.D, Ph.D.; and Minh-Ha Tran, D.O.), the Coagulation and HLA Laboratories (Director: Richard Newman, M.D.), and Molecular Pathology (Director: John Krolewski, M.D., Ph.D., and Jefferson Chan, M.D., Ph.D.).

EDUCATION AND TRAINING

Medical Student Education. The Department plays a major role in pre-clinical medical education and has been selected by UCI College of Medicine students as the best sophomore course six of the last seven years.

Graduate Studies leading to the Ph.D. degree.  The Department offers a doctoral curriculum leading to a Ph.D. in the Biological Sciences with a Concentration in Experimental Pathology. The Experimental Pathology Program emphasizes laboratory investigations to better understand the molecular and cellular mechanisms of disease. Application to this program is through the Combined Graduate Training Program in Cellular and Molecular Biosciences.

Faculty of the Experimental Pathology Graduate Program

Residency Training in Pathology.  Our fully accredited Residency Program provides comprehensive training in Anatomic and Clinical Pathology and it has trained numerous fellows in subspecialities in Neuropathology and Hematopathology. The department was recently approved for a Cytopathology Fellowship, with a tentative start date of July 1, 2005.  In addition, the Department has a longstanding commitment to the training of medical technologists.

RESEARCH

The research programs of the Department are located in laboratories at the Medical Center and on the Irvine campus. Departmental research funding has grown continuously over the past decade.  Laboratory-based research programs, summarized for each investigator above,  include investigations in immunology, microbial pathogenesis, neuropathology, cancer, inflammation, and wound healing. Clinical and translational research programs include cancer epidemiology, cytology, biomarker development, clinical lipidology, laboratory utilization, and pathogen inactivation in transfusion medicine. Research expenditures now exceed $4 million annually, supported in part by 13 grants from the National Institutes of Health.

I invite you to learn more about the Department, its faculty, staff, and trainees via the various links provided here. Please consider visiting us in person at our various sites where we are involved in patient care, teaching, and research venues.