Pathology Update 2025: Attending Live Meetings Enhances Engagement and Learning

Attending a meeting in-person with colleagues and renowned presenters offers advantages that are hard to achieve via online learning. Pathology Update 2025, to be held May 19-23 at the ASCP headquarters in Chicago, offers that face-to-face contact and the opportunity to learn from subspecialty trained experts.     

“The interactive nature is what makes Pathology Update stand out. You attend sessions in a small room with approximately 30 people and can ask questions and discuss cases with an expert in a supportive environment,” says Gulisa Turashvili, MD, PhD, associate pathologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and associate professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA. Dr. Turashvili and her colleague, Kyle Devins, MD, an attending pathologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and assistant professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School, are teaching a full day course on gynecologic pathology at Pathology Update 2025.  

They will focus on updates and recent developments over the past few years. They will also cover new and emerging classification systems for diagnostic entities such as vulvar squamous cell carcinomas and endocervical adenocarcinomas, and present tips for distinguishing cancer from common benign mimics. “Something can appear benign, but it can behave in an aggressive fashion,” says Dr. Devins. “The pathologist will have to know the morphologic features to make the right diagnosis. Malignant entities can mimic benign entities.” 

Drs. Turashvili and Devins will show slides of specific cases with clinical history and then have participants divide into small groups to discuss the differential diagnosis for several minutes. Then the entire class reconvenes, and a member of each group summarizes their discussions and diagnosis. 

This process helps to reinforce the learning. Then, when participants return to their offices and try to apply these same concepts, they will have already practiced this and it will feel more familiar. 

Also teaching at Pathology Update 2025 will be Humberto Trejo Bittar, MD, an anatomic pathologist and section head of thoracic pathology at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida, and medical director of autopsy service at Moffitt. He appreciates the feedback and teaching resources that ASCP provides to the course instructors to make the sessions very engaging to participants.  

“We get a lot of support from ASCP’s education department so that we know how to give the most effective presentation of our teaching material,” he explains. 

His presentation will focus on emerging topics in thoracic pathology, including ways to diagnose mesothelioma, and the new staging system to address lung cancer. The course is targeted to community pathologists, who are generalists rather than specialists who see these types of cases frequently.  

He will teach the course in collaboration with Mitra Mehrad, MD, head of thoracic path at Vanderbilt University Medical School.  

Dr. Bittar, Dr. Turashvili, and Dr. Devins are only a few of the leading experts who will be teaching at Pathology Update. 

Dr. Turashvili points out that the caliber of the presenters is second to none. “All of us practice at academic medical centers where excellence is expected,” Dr. Turashvili adds. “We each go beyond what is typically required of us. We do research, we handle complex, challenging and interesting cases, and we train the next generation of pathologists. It is our background training and subspecialty expertise that makes us stand out.” 

Learn more about Pathology Update 2025 and register here.