Associate Professor Sergio Piña-Oviedo, MD, was invited to give a talk at the 37th European Congress of Pathology that took place Sept. 6-10, 2025, in Vienna, Austria. He participated in the history of pathology session titled “Emerging & Re-Emerging Diseases: The Importance of the History of Pathology.”
In this session, Piña-Oviedo presented a conference titled “Syphilis: A Medieval Foe Back in the XXI Century”. In his talk, he discussed how syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease caused by the bacterium Treponema pallidum, became a world-wide disease. He also explained the evolution of the concept of syphilis through time, the discovery of T. pallidum and its prevalence today, as well as some recent social trends related to the re-emergence of this infection.
Piña-Oviedo serves in Duke’s divisions of Hematopathology and Thoracic Pathology and is associate director of Proteomics for the Biorepository and Precision Pathology Center. (BRPC). He joined the faculty in March 2022 as an assistant professor, and is certified both in anatomic and clinical pathology and in hematopathology. He is past-president of the History of Pathology Society.
In July 2025, he was appointed as a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Mediastinum, the official publication of the International Thymic Malignancy Interest Group (ITMIG).