Chris Pierson, M.D. '97, Res. '02, Ph.D. '02

Dr. Pierson is a board certified neuropathologist who has spent his career in academic medicine with various roles in clinical service, research and medical education. He is grateful to the mentors and teachers he had at Wayne State who sparked his interest in Pathology and nurtured it in a supportive learning environment. Following the completion of Anatomic Pathology residency training at DMC, he moved to Boston for fellowship training in neuropathology at Brigham and Women’s and Boston Children’s Hospital. Upon graduating from fellowship, he became a staff neuropathologist at those hospitals and Instructor in Pathology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Pierson subsequently moved to Columbus, Ohio where he practices neuropathology at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and is Clinical Professor of Pathology and Anatomy at the Ohio State University College of Medicine. His clinical interests include perinatal neuropathology, pediatric brain tumor diagnostics and pediatric neuromuscular disease. Columbus Monthly magazine has recognized Dr. Pierson as a Top Doctor for 10 years. He serves or has served as part of central neuropathology review for multiple cooperative groups including Children’s Oncology Group, HeadStart, and The Cancer Genome Atlas, among others.

Dr. Pierson is passionate about undergraduate medical education and strives to ensure that all students reach their full potential. Dr. Pierson teaches pathology and histology and serves as Co-director of the preclinical undergraduate medical curriculum at the Ohio State University College of Medicine. Dr. Pierson’s teaching awards include the Master Teacher Award, the Faculty Teacher Award from the OSU Medical Alumni Society and the highest teaching award the OSU College of Medicine bestows, the Professor of the Year. He has guided many Anatomy graduate students toward MS and PhD degrees. Mentorship is one of Dr. Pierson’s values and he is honored to have received the Portfolio Coach of the Year award and the Linda Stone Award for medical student mentorship as well as the Children’s Oncology Group Excellence in Mentoring award for mentoring junior faculty.

To date he has well over 100 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters on diverse topics in neuropathology and medical education. Scientific contributions include the generation of the Mtm1 R69C mouse model, identifying SPEG variants as a cause of centronuclear myopathy, establishing the neuropathology of cerebellar hemorrhage, characterizing gray matter pathology associated with periventricular leukomalacia and characterizing molecular alterations in brain tumors and somatic mutations in epilepsy. His work has appeared in high impact journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Medicine, Cell, Nature Genetics and Acta Neuropathologica. Dr. Pierson serves as an Assistant Editor for Academic Medicine. He is a member of Alpha Omega Alpha, the Gold Humanism Honor Society and Courage to Teach. In his spare time, Dr. Pierson enjoys going for walks with his family, running, playing Ultimate Frisbee, the music of the Grateful Dead and reading science fiction.