Meet the pathologists working inside UNC’s medical labs

UNC McLendon Clinical Laboratories perform millions of clinical tests annually. Its largest specialized division, chemistry, tests over 1,500,000 samples annually. The faculty, fellows and residents of the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine review and process these tests, completing potentially life-saving work every day.

For Dr. Jonathan Galeotti, his interest in the field of lab medicine stemmed from a fascination with life at the cellular level. As a hematopathologist at the UNC School of Medicine, he studies diseases that affect blood cells.

“We’re all exposed to similar things in the environment, so why do some people get cancer and some people don’t?” Galeotti said. “I loved the fact that in hematopathology, it’s often very clear. These patients are normal – they’re walking around like you and I, just living their lives – and then something happens. I can point to that exact thing in hematopathology.”

Em Price, a post-sophomore fellow in pathology and laboratory medicine, found that the work he performed in the lab was an ideal combination of his multiple distinct interests in the field of medicine.

“I was interested in surgery and infectious disease, which are two very different things,” Price said. “One was a little more hands-on. I really liked anatomy and I wanted to work with anatomy. I wanted to use my hands, and infectious disease was more my research and academic side. I figured pathology was a lot of both, and it ended up being absolutely the perfect combination.”

Price said pathology really wasn't on the front page of every journal and that surgery as a field was seen as a little more "glamorous.”

“I’m so glad that I discovered (lab work) — it’s a hidden gem,” he said.

Essential duties in the department involve running quality checks on each sample; studying organic matter like blood, bone marrow and tissue for markers of disease and determining an accurate diagnosis for each patient. One particularly critical task is DNA fingerprinting, which allows doctors to identify whether a marrow or stem cell transplant was successful in a patient.

“I like to joke that every day, I never know what I’m going to walk into – what’s going to be the topic or the question,” disease microbiologist Samantha Giffen said. “You just never know what’s going to come through those doors. My job is to be everywhere around the lab: where I’m needed, where there’s questions and where they need my help. It’s a little bit of everything.”

Despite the challenges of working in a laboratory setting, doctors and lab scientists at the University value their work. 

For Dr. Vorapat Vorapanya, a clinical research associate at the Gillings School of Global Public Health, diagnosing a patient so that they can receive the care they need to live a long, healthy life is the most rewarding part of her job.

“When I put the pieces together, it’s like, ‘A-ha! That’s why he presents with that symptom.’ It’s very, very rewarding,” she said. “At least I do my part, at least I help the patient with figuring out what they have, because sometimes it’s a super rare disease or some cancer that needs a lot of staging.” 

Some members of the Department of Pathology and Lab Medicine also balance their medical duties with instructional roles. Galeotti, who is also a clinical assistant professor, said that teaching medical students is one of the parts of the job he enjoys the most.

“You have this person who’s never talked about leukemia before, who’s never seen this disease, who’s never had any concept of the other testing we do, and you get to teach them,” Galeotti said. “You see them start to understand it, and it’s really rewarding to explain it to somebody and have them say, ‘Oh, I get that! I get why that’s important. I understand how we did that.’ It’s a really good feeling.”

Between April 23 and April 29, lab scientists and pathologists will celebrate Medical Laboratory Professionals Week. This honors work like what is done at Pathology and Lab Medicine Department at UNC, highlighting scientists' contributions to the medical care of patients across the country.

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