Transcription

• Brittani Riddle

  What does it mean to be a Black woman in pathology? Today, in a special edition of Path News Network, a conversation about being Black in this specialty.

• Valerie Fitzhugh

  I've done things that accomplish things that some people have only dreamed of. And I really do feel like I am so blessed because I've done that.

• Brittani Riddle

  Coming up next. Welcome to the Path News Network Daily Edition from the College of American Pathologists. Today is Friday, February 27th. I'm Brittani Riddle. 2026 marks 100 years since the commemoration of Black History Month, founded by Carter G. Woodson. In pathology, there have been African American pioneers like Dr. William A. Hinton, widely recognized as the first Black pathologist and inventor of the Hinton test, and Dr. Vivian Pinn. the first full-time director of the NIH Office of Research on Women's Health. On this special edition of Path News, we're closing out Black History Month with a conversation with the current trailblazer, Dr. Valerie Fitzhugh, professor and chair of the Department of Pathology, Immunology, and Laboratory Medicine at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. She shares her journey as a Black woman in pathology. Dr. Fitzhugh, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm so excited and thankful that you are spending some time with me as we close out Black History Month. So I really wanted to start with your story. What sparked your interest and your curiosity in pathology?

• Valerie Fitzhugh

  My story is a little weird, right? I initially wanted to be a biological oceanographer.

• Brittani Riddle

  Oh, wow.

• Valerie Fitzhugh

  I did an entire summer internship at the Rutgers Marine Field Station in Tuckerton, New Jersey. And I have to give them a shout out because it was probably one of the greatest research experiences of my life. It also totally terrified me about doing research and having to write grants and all those things, which is really funny because I do that all now. Right. But not knowing that back then, the fear of watching them... When grants were close to being due and writing things and trying to get them accepted, I was just like, this is not the road for me. So I thought to myself, all right, Val, what are you going to do with your brain? Because you have a brain that can help people. What are you going to do with it? And so that's when I decided, you know what, medical school may not be so bad. And I can help people. I can see patients. I can do the whole thing. And so I completely switched gears, started doing a lot of, you know, I did a summer. like health internship in the summer right before my senior year to give me some experience. I actually saw patients with Dr. Joy Anderson, who was a radiation oncologist in Newark back at the time, and really kind of one of my first role models because she was a Black woman in medicine and I didn't know that many. And so working with her was a lot of fun because she was brilliant. And she taught me a lot about radiation oncology. Decided I did not want to do that, though. And so I took my MCATs and... I got the right scores and I got into medical school. And I honestly thought I was going to be an orthopedic surgeon. I wanted to do orthopedic oncology. And I went so far as to apply for a residency in orthopedics. And it was while I was doing my orthopedics acting internship that I really got exposed to being in the lab. Because we would go over there for frozen sections. And I was watching somebody who also became then one of my mentors. look at frozen sections and basically tell these male surgeons what to do and I'm like oh this is a great job it's too bad I didn't know about this right before I had to apply for orthopedics well as you could probably figure out I'm not an orthopedic surgeon I did not match in orthopedics and at the time that I applied since 2003 and 2004 there was very little diversity in orthopedics very few, there's still very few women, even fewer people of color. And so I wasn't, even though I obviously had the grades, obviously had the scores, like I got the interviews, had plenty of places to rank, but it didn't work out. And so with that, I kind of went back to pathology because I was like, well, I really enjoyed that. It'll stimulate my brain. I love the science of pathology because pathology is great in that it's it's science and it's medicine. And I love that. And I'm like, all right, so here we go. And I ended up at that time was to scramble because I'm old. So I scrambled into pathology and really like from there, a career was born.

• Brittani Riddle

  You talked about there wasn't a lot of representation when you were doing your fellowship in the early 2000s. It's now 2026. What changes, if any, have you seen in terms of Black representation in pathology?

• Valerie Fitzhugh

  I think in terms of Black representation, we are still quite short. There aren't many of us in the specialty. You know, I look at academic pathology in particular because that's... the world in which I spend most of my time playing, you know, it's only, like, three percent. Wow. That's not, I mean, that's not a big number. And if you think of, you know, like, Black women chairs in pathology, like, I think I'm, like, the fourth ever.

• Brittani Riddle

  Wow.

• Valerie Fitzhugh

  And I know there's at least now a fifth behind me, but that's, like, and it's 2026. So, and academic chairs, I should be, I should be fair to say that. So we need more representation, like, you know, particularly like Black women in pathology in particular. We're just not there yet. And what I try to do, and I mean, I meet the students in my schools early. I am the pathology student interest group advisor for both schools. So I am a person that they see very early on in their careers. I basically want them, I want them to know that they can be it because they see it.

• Brittani Riddle

  Right.

• Valerie Fitzhugh

  You know, you can't be what you don't see. And so my effort in inspiring particularly young women of color, and there are a couple of medical students that I meet with fairly regularly who are Black women who want to be pathologists, and this is why. Because I am one of, this makes me sad to say it, two Black women faculty across both of my schools and my departments. Not that I'm not trying to get more of us in. I mean, I would love to see more of us in the departments, but... Right now, it's just two of us.

• Brittani Riddle

  Wow.

• Valerie Fitzhugh

  And this is an academic, I mean, between the two schools, we're talking about 80 pathologists. So it's not a small number. So we could be doing better in recruitment, particularly of Black women especially, but Black men as well. I've worked with far fewer Black men in pathology than I have women.

• Brittani Riddle

  I love that you try to get to the students early. What advice do you have for Black medical students who you may not know a lot about pathology and are, you know, during their rotations and getting ready to decide what they want to specialize in. What do you say to get them curious about pathology?

• Valerie Fitzhugh

  So when I do my first lecture for the medical students, and I have them in their first month of medical school, it used to be the third day of medical school, but I've been bumped back now to the third week because we changed the curriculum again a little bit. One of the things I will say is pathologists are doctors. And don't let anybody tell you. otherwise. We are physicians as much as every other physician that you will encounter in your four years of medical school. On top of that, I know a lot of you think you can't see patients. Let me tell you about some subspecialties where you can. And I just start listing them. And so, because they need to understand that, you know, everybody's like, oh, pathologists don't see patients. I'm like, I saw patients for a year straight when I was a cytopathology fellow. And when I came into my first job, I saw patients on the floors. I was doing FNAs on the floors for several years before I got into all this other stuff, this leadership thing. And I just didn't have time anymore. But I want the students to know, like, if you do transfusion medicine, you can see patients in the donor room. You can, you know, you can see patients on an apheresis service. So for those people who feel like they have to be able, they have to have that patient contact, there are avenues for that in pathology. You don't have to swear away an entire specialty. because you see patients. And then some of the students, like after I teach them, they get so excited. I mean, I've gotten so many emails. I just did my longest educational stretch for the year. I'm just ended at the beginning of this week. And they are coming out in droves. And I'm like, yes, like if I can get just three of them, I've done my job. So it does get exciting. But I think, again, that presence that they see you is so important.

• Brittani Riddle

  So how do you think diversity among pathologists affects research and patient care, particularly for African-American patients?

• Valerie Fitzhugh

  So I will say from my experience, and this is one of the things that I like to communicate quite a bit, is pathologists can have a voice. And so where I really started to use my voice was in the COVID pandemic, because that is when people really got curious about testing and actually really cared about what pathologists did. Oh, What contributions were we making? And so I started to use my clinical trial experience being a patient in the Moderna trial. to speak to particularly people who look like me to say this is how the testing works this is how the vaccine works we studied all this it's safe i would not i would not tell you to do something i have would not do myself and i've done it myself because i actually got the vaccine in the trial talked about it on social media boy did that blow up ended up being on tv three times

• Brittani Riddle

  Okay.

• Valerie Fitzhugh

  It really blew up, but it's an opportunity. And so people can see pathologists. Pathology is construed, I think, in the media and elsewhere as the forensic specialty. And this is no knock on my forensic brothers and sisters because I cannot do the job they do. And I think most of them don't want to do the job I do. So it's fair. But it's important for the public to see who the people are that are responsible. When they get blood drawn... That's us. They go to surgery. Somebody diagnoses their cancer. That's us. And so they need to know, you know, who the man behind the mask is, for lack of a better term. They need to know that there are people that look just like them that do this critical life altering work. One of my favorite experiences when I was a pathologist, and I'll never forget, I'm not going to violate it, but I promise. I diagnosed a synovial sarcoma in a little boy. He was only about 12 years old. And he was a little black boy. And so it's kind of funny because now I have a little black son who's almost 10. But I have a diagnosis. And it's not a great diagnosis. It's not a malignancy that you want. And it still happened. And I used to tell people in the office, if a family comes to collect slides for... anything that I've diagnosed, please call me. I'd love to meet them because I think it's so important for patients to know who you are. And so they called me when this little boy and his mom came and I went to the main office and I saw them there. And as they were giving them the slide, I said, hi, I just want to say, I just want to introduce myself. I'm the doctor who read your son's slide. The little boy was there. He was cute as a little thing. Oh, I went back in my off in a cry, but not the point. He was cute. And... the mom just hugged me and she held and she was starving and she just said thank you for being you wow that to me makes the whole job worth it it's not something we can do every day but it's something it just it means so much that we can have that we have a huge role in patients lives and patients should know who the people are who are reading their slides.

• Brittani Riddle

  Wow that isso powerful. And I'm trying not to tear up because that is just, it just means so much because, you know, it can be so scary to get a diagnosis. And I'm almost at a loss for words, but this has been so thought provoking. Is there anything else you want to share about diversifying the field? Of course, in recognition of Black History Month and, you know, looking ahead to Women's History Month, but just all year round.

• Valerie Fitzhugh

  Sometimes, yeah, I have colleagues kind of in jest, but it And they say it in jest, but it really kind of is my life. And I have people who will say, you're a unicorn. Because in a lot of ways, I almost feel like an imaginary animal sometimes. I just, I've done things and accomplished things that some people have only dreamed of. And I really do feel like I am so blessed because I've done that. I also don't think... I will be the only one who's like me. There is so much growth right now in pathology. I'm trying to convince anybody, everybody who's interested to really look at it, and not just at the level of being a pathologist, but also a lot of the lab affiliated specialties, like medical technologists and cytologists, the people who help us do our jobs every day. It's such an amazing opportunity. It's such a gift and a blessing. to be able to touch people's lives the way I do as a pathologist. And I hope that I'll be able to do it again for a really long time because I love doing it. I love what I do. And I love the people I work with. I've just been so fortunate. And I do hope that someday down the road there will be another Valerie Fitzhugh out there. young woman that I may teach or that one of my colleagues may teach that becomes, you know, like that next Black woman who is successful in the field and has the opportunity to serve as a chair, you know, of a major medical institution and be able to be a senior vice president in a health system. I mean, these things are not, I, if you had told me 20 years ago I was going to be this, I would have laughed. Because I would never have thought in my wildest dreams that I would have accomplished what I would have accomplished. And I think pathology is such an amazing avenue to do the work that I do. And I hope that other people will see that and maybe want to do it too. That's my hope.

• Brittani Riddle

  Dr. Fitzhugh, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you again for joining me today.

• Valerie Fitzhugh

  It's my pleasure. Anytime.

• Brittani Riddle

  That's all for today on the Path News Network. Daily Edition. Thank you again to my guest, Dr. Valerie Fitzhugh. Subscribe to the Path News Network on all major podcast platforms. We're back Monday at 5 a.m. Eastern Time. Thank you for listening. Have a great day.