Pathologist-in-Chief
Director, Texas Children’s Microbiome Center Texas Children’s Hospital
Milton J. Finegold Professor and Vice Chair, Pathology and Immunology
Professor, Molecular and Human Genetics, Molecular Virology and Microbiology, Pediatrics
Core Director, Texas Medical Center Digestive Diseases Center
Baylor College of Medicine
A clinical pathologist with expertise in infectious and digestive diseases, Dr. Versalovic is an authority in pediatric laboratory medicine as a leading physician-scientist. His main clinical interests are medical microbiology, molecular diagnostics of infectious diseases, microbiome science applied to pediatric gastroenterology, genomic and metagenomic medicine, and molecular pathology. He developed the first Microbiome Center based in a children’s hospital and the first therapeutic microbiology fellowship program in the country. Dr. Versalovic has also helped create the new field of metagenomic medicine by exploring ways that metagenomics and microbial manipulation can be used to diagnose and treat human diseases.
Dr. Versalovic is advancing metagenomic medicine and its applications in chronic gastrointestinal disorders, including pediatric irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). His research program has been supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, and the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation. He has authored 199 primary manuscripts and 41 book chapters and has two patents. He has served as editor-in-chief of the Manual of Clinical Microbiology, the “Bible” of laboratory-based diagnosis of human infections.
Having received his PhD in cellular and molecular biology at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) in 1994 and his MD with honors at BCM in 1995, Dr. Versalovic pursued clinical pathology/medical microbiology residency training at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He also completed a postdoctoral research fellowship in the Division of Comparative Medicine at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. Versalovic joined the medical staff at the Massachusetts General Hospital as a clinical pathologist and served as assistant professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School. He is board certified in clinical pathology, molecular genetic pathology, and molecular diagnostics. Since 2002, Dr. Versalovic has served on the medical staff at Texas Children’s Hospital and as faculty at Baylor College of Medicine. He currently serves as pathologist-in-chief at Texas Children’s Hospital and as vice-chair of Pathology and Immunology at BCM. Dr. Versalovic also served as interim physician-in-chief, February 2020 – December 2020 and pediatrician-in-chief, December 2020 – September 2021 at Texas Children’s.
Dr. Versalovic has been recognized with BCM’s Distinguished Alumni Award and was elected to The American Academy of Microbiology in 2019.