Tomaszewski Named SUNY Distinguished Professor

The rank of distinguished professor is presented to individuals who have achieved national or international prominence in their fields.  

“I am truly honored and humbled by this recognition. Recognition by one’s peers is the highest and truest form of academic honor,” Tomaszewski says. “My visceral reaction (to learning about the honor) was, ‘Wow, they must be talking about someone else.’ I am truly grateful to my colleagues for blessing me with this honor.”

Tomaszewski, who earned his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania, is internationally renowned for his research in pathology and prognostic factors in cancer and the development of quantitative image analysis tools used in digital pathology and automated cancer diagnostics.

He is a global leader in digital pathology and computational modeling in histopathology and the informatics revolution in pathology, where he contributes to international diagnostic guidelines. A pioneer of high throughput detection of prostate cancer in histologic sections using probabilistic models and computer-aided diagnosis, he is a leader in the development of multidimensional molecular data pairings with pathological findings.

Tomaszewski was honored with a Mastership designation from the American Society for Clinical Pathology in 2014. He previously served as president of ASCP, among numerous leadership roles.

Tomaszewski continues to maintain an active collaborative research program in image science, and as chair, he is interested in building the clinical, educational and research programs at the school.

His personal specialty focus areas are in renal pathology, immunopathology and urological pathology. He provides tissue biopsy and clinical laboratory diagnoses, prognoses and therapeutic advice to patients and clinicians on medical and surgical diseases of the kidney (including kidney transplants), bladder, prostate and testes. These services include the interpretation of biopsies and pathology specimens and consultations on the ordering and results of clinical laboratory lab tests.

His interests are translational and have been focused in the domain of genitourinary pathology. He has worked collaboratively with a group of image scientists in the development of quantitative image analysis tools tailored to the needs of the digital pathology community.

His vision is to create a new analytic paradigm fusing the data from the quantitative analysis of high resolution images with multidimensional molecular data. This “fused diagnostics” approach will support personalized predictive modeling of disease and its response to therapy.

He is the author or co-author of 308 peer-reviewed publications and 24 book chapters dealing with his special interests in renal pathology, renal transplant and immunopathology. He holds four U.S. patents.

Tomaszewski, one of just 21 SUNY faculty members who earned the honor this year, came to the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in 2011 to chair the Department of Pathology and Anatomical Sciences.