JITA (Jitakshi) DE
Dr. Jitakshi De received her undergraduate education at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she earned a Bachelors of Science in Biology with Highest Honors (class of 1994). Her undergraduate research focused on identifying kinetochore mutants in S. cerevisiae yeast by applying the dicentric chromosome breakage assay. She pursued her medical education at Duke University, and received a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Student Research Fellowship (’97-’98) in the Laboratory of Signal Transduction at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to clone the unusual CCCH zinc finger proteins in Xenopus laevis. Upon completion, De pursued post doctoral studies at the Kenan Institute of Engineering, Technology, and Science of North Carolina State University (in collaboration with researchers at the Sandia National Laboratory). This research on discovery of target-specific binding peptides for the Staphylococcal bacterial toxin from a combinatorial (bead-based) synthetic hexamer peptide library led to further post-doctoral research at the Center of Biomedical Inventions (University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center), where she demonstrated solid phase capture and elimination of Mycoplasma infection from mammalian cell cultures, using a 20-mer target-specific peptide (previously identified from a bacteriophage library).
Dr. De completed her pathology residency at the McGovern Medical School of the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, and her Hematopathology fellowship at the University of Michigan. After practicing hematopathology, mainly in various commercial laboratory settings, she pursued graduate studies in U.S. Healthcare Law and attained a Master of Legal Studies (M.L.S) online from The University of Oklahoma (2017-18).
Jitakshi De, MD, MLS has >10 years of experience in the practice of pathology, with specialization in the diagnosis of blood and bone marrow malignancies and hospital-based anatomic pathology. She has served in leadership roles as a CLIA Laboratory Director as well as the Director of Hematopathology for high complexity clinical laboratories. De is an expert in blood and bone marrow pathology, including analysis and interpretation of high dimensional cytometry data. Her detailed case studies and research in acute and chronic leukemias, myeloid malignancies, classical Hodgkin lymphoma, and non-Hodgkin B cell lymphoma have been published in peer-reviewed abstracts and publications, and presented in numerous national and international meetings.
Dr. De is a Fellow of the American Society of Clinical Pathology (ASCP) and the College of American Pathologists.