Pathology-in-Chief
Department of Pathology & Immunology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA Department of Pathology, Texas Children’s Hospital
A clinical pathologist with expertise in infectious and digestive diseases, Dr. James Versalovic is an authority in pediatric laboratory medicine as a leading physician-scientist. His main clinical interests are medical microbiology, molecular diagnostics of infectious diseases, microbiome science applied to pediatric gastroenterology, genomic and metagenomic medicine, and molecular pathology. He developed the first Microbiome Center based in a children’s hospital and the first therapeutic microbiology fellowship program in the country. Dr. Versalovic has also helped create the new field of metagenomic medicine by exploring ways that metagenomics and microbial manipulation can be used to diagnose and treat human diseases.
Dr. Versalovic is advancing metagenomic medicine and its applications in chronic gastrointestinal disorders, including pediatric irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). His research program has been supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, and the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America. He has authored more than 184 primary manuscripts and more than 41 book chapters and has two patents. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of the Manual of Clinical Microbiology, the “Bible” of laboratory-based diagnosis of human infections.
Having received his PhD in cellular and molecular biology at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) in 1994 and his MD with honors at BCM in 1995, Dr. Versalovic pursued clinical pathology/medical microbiology residency training at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He also completed a postdoctoral research fellowship in the Division of Comparative Medicine at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. Versalovic joined the medical staff at the Massachusetts General Hospital as a clinical pathologist and served as Assistant Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School. He is board certified in clinical pathology, molecular genetic pathology, and molecular diagnostics.
