Director of Computational Pathology & Informatics, Associate Professor of Pathology, Urology, and Oncology, Johns Hopkins University
Leon Troper, MD Professor in Computational Pathology
Associate Professor of Pathology, Urology, and Oncology
Director of Computational Pathology & Informatics
Director of Precision Medicine Informatics
Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Dr. Baras completed his undergraduate education in biology at Georgetown University where he graduated Magna Cum Laude and was a Howard Hughes Undergraduate Scholar. Dr. Baras then went on to receive his joint MD and PhD degrees from the University of Virginia in an National Institutes of Health (NIH) Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) program, where based on his doctoral thesis he was invited by the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee (HGCN) to name the VOPP1 gene. Dr. Baras then completed his residency training in Anatomical Pathology at The Johns Hopkins Hospital followed by fellowship training in Genitourinary Pathology. He joined the faculty of the Department of Pathology at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 2014 with secondary appointment in Urology, Oncology, and Health Science Informatics. He quickly garnered a national reputation for his excellent work, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2018. In addition to his research, Dr Baras provides outstanding care as a surgical pathologist specializing in urologic and gynecologic pathology.
Dr. Baras embodies the exceedingly rare intersection of a highly trained medical practitioner with expertise in the rapidly evolving and exciting field of the data sciences. He serves as the Director of the Division of Informatics for the Department of Pathology at Johns Hopkins and is also the Director of Precision Medicine Informatics within the Sidney-Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Baras has 61 peer-reviewed original publications, with an H-index of 26. His work appears in high-impact journals including Nature Communications, Genome Research, Cancer Discovery, Lancet Oncology and Urology. He has mentored pathology residents along with doctoral and post-doctoral research fellows in informatics and data science related endeavors; he has been invited lectured on these topics at major academic institutions and national conferences. Dr. Baras believes that the integration of the data sciences into the practice of pathology represents a critical aspect of enabling precision medicine. Dr. Baras’ expertise as a practicing pathologist in conjunction with his established expertise in the data sciences has positioned him ideally to efficiently identify clinically relevant applications of machine learning in pathology.