Improving patient outcomes and quality of care requires systematic investigation and evaluation of current clinical services, and innovation and application of new approaches for health care delivery. 

Faculty in our department are involved in research and creative work related to new diagnostic technologies, new approaches to gathering and using medical information to identify trends important to care. Their work is creating fresh new ways to practice pathology and laboratory medicine that is safer, more effective, and more cost-efficient. 

Current research in our department includes:

• New slide-free tissue imaging methods developed within the department, which include
  • DUET, currently under validation in a multi-institutional trial funded by a NIH R01 grant for PI Assistant Professor Farzad Fereidouni for “Rapid Quantitative Renal Fibrosis Evaluation with Dual Mode Microscopy”
  • Applications with smart phones
• Validation and clinical applications of digital pathology
• Better methods for immunohistochemistry to improve diagnosis in renal disease, and GI tumors and others.
• Artificial intelligence to predict graft-vs-host disease in kidney transplantation, acute kidney failure in burn patients, and improve diagnosis of colon and GI neuroendocrine tumors.
• Collaboration with Amazon Web Services to evaluate the use of synthetic data for machine learning to predict diagnosis of tuberculosis.
• Better approaches to address coagulation complications in childhood trauma and microangiopathies.

Meet our faculty who are pursuing these creative new approaches to health care delivery:

• Sarah Barnhard, M.D.
• Dorina Gui, M.D., Ph.D.
• Richard Levenson, M.D. - New slide-free tissue imaging methods developed within the department, which include MUSE (microscopy with UV surface excitation), now a start-up seeking to begin FDA trials in 2025, and FIBI (fluorescence imitating brightfield imaging), a complementary approach that also generates images closely resembling standard H&E-stained slides directly from fresh tissue. FIBI has been installed in Ghana to provide real-time diagnoses from breast core-needle biopsies. Other ongoing research efforts include stain-free in-vivo skin imaging and development of novel nasal spray approaches for the prevention of respiratory infections.
• Nam Tran, Ph.D.
• John Paul Graff, D.O.
• Kristin Grimsrud, D.V.M., Ph.D. - Research focuses on improving drug dosing and safety in vulnerable populations through the integration of pharmacogenetics, translational models, and precision medicine. She studies how genetic variation influences anesthetic and analgesic drug metabolism, with a particular emphasis on pediatric and burn patients. Her work bridges preclinical rodent models and human clinical research to inform individualized treatment strategies and advance care in critical and complex medical settings.