Chair's Welcome

The Department of Laboratory Medicine has a long and proud tradition of providing leading edge clinical care, outstanding biomedical research, and comprehensive education in our field. We hope that our website reflects both where we are today and what we hope to achieve.

Representing one of the two major subdisciplines of Pathology (specifically "Clinical Pathology"), the roots of the Department go back to John Peters in the 20's and 30's, who worked tirelessly to bring quantitative chemical analysis to the elucidation of disease processes. That work, which began in what was then the Metabolic Division of the Yale Department of Medicine, helped to create the basis for the modern clinical laboratory, which, of course, has now become far more inclusive, embracing hematology, microbiology, virology, immunology, transfusion medicine, cellular therapy, and genetics, as well as clinical chemistry. The Laboratory Medicine program became a full-fledged Department in 1971 and since that time has worked seamlessly together with the Department of Pathology in advancing laboratory-based diagnostics, with the Department of Internal Medicine in advancing cellular-based therapies, and with all of our colleague basic science and clinical Departments at Yale in advancing the state of biomedical research.

The Department is located in the Yale-New Haven Medical Center, which includes the Medical School, Yale New Haven Hospital (a 944 bed tertiary care facility treating over 40,000 inpatients per year and with half a million outpatient visits), the Children's Hospital at Yale-New Haven, the Smilow Cancer Center, and the Yale-New Haven Psychiatric Hospital. In addition, the Department has a major presence at the VA Connecticut Medical Center campus, located in nearby West Haven, CT (serving 300,000 veterans in southern New England), and faculty are involved in teaching and collaborative research at the main Yale University campus, located just a few blocks from the medical campus in New Haven. We are fortunate to be located in a truly livable metropolitan area, with a central 'college town' harboring a remarkable array of restaurants, theatre, music venues, museums, and nightlife and surrounded by small New England towns, many of which border either on Long Island Sound or on the foothills of the Blue Mountains. We are located approximately an hour and a quarter from New York City and two hours from Boston by high speed rail.

The Department is responsible for the clinical laboratories at all the major facilities, as well as several satellite facilities, and has patient service centers located throughout the greater New Haven area. Collectively performing over 8 million tests per year at its various sites, the Department provides high technology reference testing (genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, cellular assays) to other institutions throughout New England and as far away as Puerto Rico. New physical facilities at the Yale-New Haven Medical Center in the brand-new Park Street building were constructed and completed in 2010 and include 60,000 square feet of clinical laboratory space. The Transfusion and Cellular Therapy services are responsible for apheresis procedures, stem cell collection and engineering, and other cellular and protein infusion services. Residencies in CP and AP/CP (under a single aegis with the Department of Pathology) are offered along with fellowships in Transfusion Medicine and Microbiology, and, also under the common aegis with Pathology, Hematopathology and Molecular Genetic Pathology.

With approximately $10 million in research funding, the faculty are engaged in basic, translational and clinical research. The major emphasis is on immunohematology, virology, structural biology, genetics, host-pathogen interactions, stem cell biology, and bioengineering. New research labs are being constructed for the Department and are expected to be ready in 2011.

The Department has NIH-funded research training programs in Immunohematology at the post-doctoral level and Virology at the pre-doctoral level. The Department also has an NIH-funded Center of Excellence in Molecular Hematology as well as Clinical Translational Research Core Facilities in Immune Monitoring and Cellular Therapy.

In addition, core facilities in Flow Cytometry, Gnotobiotic Biology and High Throughput Patient Sample Acquisition are operated for the benefit of the entire medical school. The Department is responsible for the required Medical Microbiology Course and Laboratory Medicine course during the pre-clinical years, Laboratory Medicine teaching within the required core Medicine clerkship in the clinical years, and also has elective courses in advanced Laboratory Medicine and in combined Pathology & Laboratory Medicine.

Again we welcome you to our website. Please contact us if we can provide additional information about the Department.