Speaker Profile
Alexander Lazar

Alexander Lazar MD, PhD

Pathology
Houston, Texas, United States of America

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Alexander Lazar, M.D., Ph.D. was born in Santa Ana, California. He is currently faculty at The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas where his clinical focus is the diagnosis of bone and soft tissue tumors, solid tumor molecular testing, and next generation based sequencing for therapeutic selection and triage to clinical trials. A noted authority on the classification and molecular characteristics of sarcoma and melanoma, he is also founding Director of an ACGME-accredited Soft Tissue Pathology Fellowship Program.

He is training the next generation of bone and soft tissue pathologists and translational researchers. He is the principal investigator of an NIH-funded translational research lab focused on genomic characterization of many sarcoma types well as melanoma for use in diagnosis, correlation with clinical outcome and search for novel therapeutic interventions. His collaborative research program has resulted in the publication more than 275 peer-reviewed manuscripts, book chapters, and books edited.

Alex is a member of multiple editorial boards including serving as Senior Associate Editor for Laboratory Investigation and editorial board member of Modern Pathology. He is deeply committed to the peer review and publication process. He writes the monthly column Inside the USCAP Journals and just completed a term on the USCAP Education Committee. He has leadership positions within the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) for sarcoma staging and the College of American Pathologists (CAP) with oversight of the protocols for defined pathology reporting of sarcomas and melanoma, including molecular diagnostics.

He participated in producing the 2013 World Health Organization (WHO) classification system for bone and soft tissue tumors. He is a co-chair of The Cancer Genome Atlas project for sarcoma, also funded by the NIH, which is exploring and will define the genomic features of several sarcoma types and fuel additional studies to understand sarcomagenesis. He has lectured widely across the globe to include all 50 of the United States, as well as all continents excepting the polar regions and is trying to figure out how to get invited there.
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