Adam Bagg is a Hematopathologist with expertise in the area of the Molecular Pathology of Hematologic Malignancies. He attended medical school at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa (a long, long time ago), where he also completed his Pathology training in Laboratory Hematology / Hematopathology in 1988. In 1989, he moved to the United States for a one-year post-doctoral fellowship and has remained there ever since. He spent a decade at Georgetown University in Washington DC, where he repeated residency and fellowship training and subsequently joined the faculty, ultimately as Director of Hematopathology.
Currently, Dr. Bagg is a Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (where he has been for 18 years), and divides his time between directing Hematology, attending in hematopathology (he also has a busy extramural consultation practice), teaching and research. He was Director of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of America-funded Minimal Residual Disease Core Facility of the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Centre for Immunotherapy for 10 years. Between 2010 and 2015 he was Medical Director of the Cancer Cytogenetics Laboratory, and served as Interim Director of Hematopathology between 2013 and 2015.
Dr. Bagg’s research is focused in three areas: 1) development of new assays, in particular molecular assays, to help diagnose and prognosticate hematologic malignancies; 2) minimal residual disease testing; and 3) developing new tools to facilitate the diagnosis of myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS). He was once awarded a patent for a novel flow cytometry assay for diagnosing MDS. He has been the recipient of numerous research grants, including some from the NIH.
He engages in an array of extramural and intramural teaching endeavors, and has received numerous awards recognizing his skill in information transfer, being awarded the Kevin E. Salhany MD Award for Excellence in Clinical Teaching in 2000, less than one year after arriving at the University of Pennsylvania. He received this award again in 2010. He has also received teaching awards from Thomas Jefferson University. For the past eight years (2010 to 2017), he was voted by his peers as one of Philadelphia’s “Top Doctors”. In 2012 (and since), he was noted by US News and World Report to be in the top 1 percent of doctors in the United States. In 2011, he was elected to Council/Board of Directors of USCAP for a four-year term.
Dr. Bagg is a renowned speaker who has lectured extensively nationally (including at USCAP, ASCP, AMP, CAP, ACLPS, AACC, ISLH and ASH) and internationally (Northern Ireland, Germany, India, China, South Korea, Singapore, South Africa, Brazil, Lebanon, Canada, Mexico, Sudan, Turkey, Romania, Scotland, Iran and Australia). He has over 170 publications, including peer-reviewed articles, invited reviews and textbook chapters, most in the realm of the molecular pathology of hematologic malignancies. A publication that he was a coauthor on (CART19 T-cells to treat CLL, PI Carl June) was the most downloaded article in Science Translational Medicine for 2011. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Molecular Diagnostics and on the Editorial Board of Advances in Anatomic Pathology.
