Duke Division Chief of Cardiovascular Pathology Carolyn Glass, MD, PhD, received the 2024-2025 Society of Cardiovascular Pathology (SCVP) Margaret Billingham Award at the Society’s Annual Award Dinner in March 2025. It was held in conjunction with the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology (USCAP) Annual Meeting in Boston, Massachusetts.
The award celebrates the top publications in Cardiovascular Pathology. It’s named after the legendary cardiovascular pathologist, Margaret Billingham, whose career included the publication of many seminal studies.
Margaret E. Billingham (Sept. 20, 1930 - July 14, 2009) was a pioneering cardiac pathologist from Stanford University Medical Center, who made significant achievements in the early recognition and grading of heart transplant rejection. She’s also known for defining chronic rejection and techniques for the heart endomyocardial biopsy.
In January 2025, Glass was appointed as associate editor for the journal Cardiovascular Pathology (Elsevier), SCVP’s official publication.
She has spent the last 30 years in healthcare, dedicating the last decade to the diagnostic side as a cardiothoracic pathologist. She initially trained as a vascular surgeon with a focus on endovascular/interventional procedures through the Integrated Vascular Surgery Program at the University of Rochester Medical Center. After receiving her PhD in the areas of genomics and epigenetics, she completed residency in Anatomic Pathology and a cardiothoracic pathology fellowship at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School. Glass was mentored by Gayle Winters, MD, Richard Mitchell, MD, PhD, and Fred Schoen, MD, PhD, distinguished cardiovascular pathologists at BWH/Harvard, who were instrumental in defining the International Society Heart and Lung Transplantion criteria for cardiac transplant rejection and numerous other seminal contributions to the field of cardiac pathology.
She received the SCVP Young Investigator’s Award, the William von Liebig Vascular Biology Research Fellowship at the Harvard Institutes of Medicine, and has authored numerous publications and national presentations in cardiovascular disease and cardiovascular surgery. She has active collaborations with the Duke Departments of Cardiology, Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery, and Electrical Engineering/Computer Science.
In addition, she is a co-director of Duke’s AI and Computational Pathology division. Currently, Glass and the lab of Changhuei Yang, PhD, Chair of Electrical Engineering at California Institute of Technology (CalTech) are collaborating to bring the first machine learning algorithm for the diagnosis of heart transplant rejection to clinical implementation grade.