Focus on Faculty: Jiqing Ye, MD, PhD
Hometown: Xishui County, Hubei, China
Family: My nuclear family is here in Rochester. My elder son recently started a job in Denver, CO. My extended family is in China. My late father, after completing six years of elementary education, began
studying Traditional Chinese Medicine at the age of 12. He became a “barefoot” doctor and started seeing patients at the age of 17. He prescribed Western medicine and Chinese herbs for his patients. He
eventually became chief of the local town hospital, serving a population of approximately 70,000. Education: I received my medical education at Beijing Medical University, now called Peking University Health Science Center. My PhD education was in Biology, specifically in Structural Biology, at Indiana University.
What brought you to Rochester?
My wife got a job offer from the University of Rochester. I followed her and got my resident training here. After a year of fellowship training at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Ireturned to work at Rochester General Hospital alongside a group of wonderful pathologists and colleagues in oncology and surgery. Work-life balance has been good; however, I began to yearn for opportunities in translational research and teaching. When I was a resident here, the department was supportive of translational research for both residents and faculty.
What about your specialty excites you?
My focus is on Thoracic and GU subspecialty pathology. I am also interested in GI pathology. In the era of low-dose CT screening for lung cancer, there are challenges in managing patients with lung nodules. There are research opportunities for improvement. Guided by the principle of “do no harm,” my daily practice will give me ideas aimed at improving clinical management.
Was there an individual who confirmed pathology was your chosen field?
I am grateful to Dr. Eileen (Dan) Ryan for accepting me into the resident program. Drs. Peter Sims and Hartmut “Hucky” Land helped me to transition from basic research to clinical medicine. The accepted wisdom is that if a pathologist stays in private practice for longer than five years, it will be challenging to return to academic practice. I have stayed in private practice for almost 12 years. I am also thankful to Dr. Christa Whitney-Miller and the faculty.
Who or what prepared you most for your career?
During my residency training, I witnessed the research and application of immunohistochemical stains for tumor classification. At the beginning of my career, I witnessed the revolution in applying molecular pathology to tumor classification, risk stratification, and targeted therapy. My knowledge of molecular and cellular biology and critical thinking, fostered by Drs. Don Wiley and Tom Rapoport during my postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School, helps me stay up to date in molecular pathology.
Where do you think your specialty is going in the future?
The pace of advancement in pathology is accelerating. The pathological theories have progressed from the humoral theory, solidism, and organ pathology, to cellular and clinical pathology, to molecular and digital pathology. The treatment for malignancy has progressed from no therapy, to surgery, to radiation therapy, to chemotherapy, to targeted therapy; from Coley’s toxin to modern-day checkpoint and CAR-T immunotherapy. The pace of change is dazzling. It has taken me a while to learn that nuclear grooves are a diagnostic feature of granulosa cell tumor and papillary thyroid carcinoma. Benign intermediate urothelial cells and macrophages also have nuclear grooves. It probably took many pathologists before me to identify this morphological clue. With the advent of digital pathology and machine learning, artificial intelligence might identify this diagnostic clue more quickly and apply it more objectively. The recent advancement of multiplex immunofluorescence (mIF), which can simultaneously profile the expression of multiple proteins and reveal organelle architecture and distribution, might eventually correlate the genetic alterations and morphologic changes. For example, we might be more objectively differentiating a neuroendocrine carcinoma from an adenocarcinoma with some neuroendocrine marker expression.
What is one thing you think could bring more young people to the field?
Persuade the pop culture to come up with a pathologist character other than a forensic pathologist. Joking aside, we should encourage medical students rotating through our service. We could offer tours and summer internships to undergraduate students and high school students. We can remind medical students that Rudolf Virchow, James Ewing, Sydney Farber, and many other giants were pathologists. Digging deeper, there is still gold to be found in this field.