Bollag named Distinguished Chair for Oncologic Pathology

AUGUSTA, Ga. – Dr. Roni Bollag, associate professor of pathology at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University and director of the Georgia Cancer Center’s Biorepository, has been named Distinguished Chair for Oncologic Pathology.

Endowed chairs and professorships at the state’s public medical school are funded by the medical school’s endowment and are designed to attract and retain outstanding faculty who have distinguished themselves through their teaching, research and scholarly writing. Appointment to an endowed position is intended to be MCG’s most prestigious recognition of continuing scholarly achievement and distinction.

“Dr. Bollag’s leadership of the Biorepository is certainly an essential part of oncology research on this campus and beyond,” says Dr. Amyn Rojiani, Edgar R. Pund Distinguished Chair and Chairman of the MCG Department of Pathology. “But even more importantly, his commitment to the spirit of collaboration has helped build and sustain stronger research efforts across the state and country.”

The decade-old Biorepository provides a centralized service for procuring and distributing tissue and fluids to support basic and translational cancer research across the university system. This translational research effort includes not only specimens from MCG, but also from multiple hospitals in the state of Georgia participating in the BioRepository Alliance of Georgia for Oncology (BRAG-Onc). Under Bollag’s leadership, Augusta University has also become part of the TIES Cancer Research Network, a National Cancer Institute-funded multi-institutional informatics project that is aimed at linking pathology databases at major academic institutions in a collaborative research alliance.

He is a co- and sub-investigator on a number of grants, including a National Cancer Institute minority Community Oncology Research Program grant with Dr. Sharad A. Ghamande, chief of the Section of Gynecologic Oncology at MCG and associate director for clinical research at the Georgia Cancer Center. The research supported by this award is helping build a molecular profile of six common cancers that often strike early and disproportionately affect minority patients.

He also serves as a sub-investigator on a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention initiative linking major academic institutions in Georgia to raise awareness of complications of transfusion in chronically transfused patients with sickle cell disease and thalassemia.

Bollag, who also directs MCG’s Transfusion Medicine Fellowship, joined the faculty in 1994 as an assistant professor in the Departments of Medicine and Cellular Biology and Anatomy after earning master’s and doctoral degrees in human genetics and completing postdoctoral training in therapeutic radiology at Yale University and in molecular biology at Princeton University. In 2004, he graduated from MCG, where he also completed a residency in anatomic and clinical pathology and a fellowship in transfusion medicine.

He also serves as laboratory and medical director of the Cord Blood Service at Xytex Corporation, a global provider of cryoservices.

He is a member of the American Medical Association and American Association of Blood Banks, and is a fellow of the College of American Pathologists and American Society of Clinical Pathology. Bollag has been part of more than a dozen presentations at national, regional and state scientific meetings over the last five years. He has authored or co-authored more than 50 scientific articles, four book chapters and two patents.