Assistant Professor of Medicine 
Department of Pathology

Dr. Girish Venkataraman is a hematopathologist focused on lymphoma. He completed a residency in Anatomic and Clinical Pathology at Loyola University Medical Center, Maywood, Illinois, in 2008 and went on to complete his hematopathology fellowship at the NCI/NIH in 2010.

He has been with University of Chicago since 2013 and is an active pathology member of the biobank team. For the biobank, he oversees the diagnostic aspects, as well as tissue array logistics, which involve making sure that the diagnostic lymphoma tissues are categorized appropriately for banking purposes. He works as a team with other members, including Jessica and Lara, as well as Madina Sukhanova, cytogeneticist for annotation of the biobank pathology data within Redcap.

An oral presentation of one of the patients consented in the biobank was chosen from over 200 submitted. This case (titled “Unusually Aggressive BCLU with Double-Hit Genetics by Chromothripsis Identified on Chromosomal Microarray”) was presented by the Hematopathology fellow Charles Van Slambrouck at the European Association of Hematopathology annual meeting in Basel, Switzerland, between September 3-8, 2016. Other coauthors in this included Sonali Smith and Madina Sukhanova besides Girish Venkataraman (senior author). This case was very well-received at the conference and was the first to describe alternative unusual mechanisms of c-MYC activation in aggressive large B-cell lymphomas emphasizing the need for more frequent use of SNP arrays in aggressive large B-cell lymphomas.