Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) mourns the loss of Scott B. Lovitch, MD, PhD, attending pathologist on the Hematopathology and Molecular Diagnostic Pathology services, who died suddenly on April 13. He was 45.

Remembered as much for his kindness as for his clinical expertise and gift for teaching, Dr. Lovitch had been a member of the Brigham and Harvard Medical School (HMS) communities since 2007.

“Scott was an outstanding diagnostician who went well beyond the call of duty to make sure our cancer patients got the right therapies,” said Jon Aster, MD, PhD, chief of Hematopathology. “He was also a remarkably effective, passionate teacher and a serious immunology researcher. He was the classic Brigham triple threat.”

As a clinician, Dr. Lovitch specialized in the diagnostic interpretation of blood, bone marrow and lymph nodes, flow cytometry, hemoglobin electrophoresis and molecular diagnostics.

“We’ve lost an enormous talent in both hematopathology and molecular pathology,” said hematopathologist Elizabeth Morgan, MD, who attended Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis with Dr. Lovitch and bonded over matching into the Brigham’s Pathology Residency Program in the same year. “Scott and I counted our first bone marrow aspirate together on a double-headed microscope. He was a brilliant and wonderful colleague for 22 years.”

After finishing his pathology residency and hematopathology fellowship at the Brigham, Dr. Lovitch became a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Arlene Sharpe, MD, PhD, from 2010 to 2015, studying the role of coinhibitory receptors in regulating T cell metabolism.

Dr. Lovitch first began to dabble in teaching at HMS and the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST) as a resident, and “it became clear that he had found his true calling,” said Richard Mitchell, MD, PhD, vice chair for Education of Pathology at BWH and director of Education for Enterprise Pathology at Mass General Brigham. Once he became an attending physician in 2015, Dr. Lovitch decided to devote a significant portion of his professional career to teaching.

Dr. Lovitch won many teaching awards over the years, the most recent and prominent being the 2023 Bernard Lown Award for Excellence in Teaching. At the time of his death, he was an assistant professor of Pathology at HMS, with a major role in the pathology education of the HMS Pathways medical students, as well as in the training of residents and fellows at BWH. He continued to give lectures in hematology at HST and was a premedical advisor to undergraduate students at Harvard College. More recently, Dr. Lovitch served on the admissions committee for the Pathways program, acting as vice chair this past year.

“Scott was the person we pointed to when anyone was looking to learn how to teach,” said Mitchell. “For a lot of medical students, pathology is a necessary evil. Scott’s love and enthusiasm for inspiring that ‘a-ha’ moment in students enabled them to change their mindset about pathology.” Morgan echoed this sentiment, referring to Dr. Lovitch as “our emissary for pathology to medical students.”

A lasting memory for Aster will be of Dr. Lovitch “bustling around,” surrounded by students. “Whenever I’d see him in the department, there were always two or three medical students around him,” he recalled. “Scott really loved students, and students really loved Scott. He was like the Pied Piper of students.”

For Mitchell, Dr. Lovitch will be fondly remembered as a “dynamo,” always with an armful of materials he was carrying from one place to another. “I could tell just from the rapidity of his steps that it was Scott walking down the corridor,” he said. “He was a man always in motion.”

In the past several years, Dr. Lovitch was working closely with medical students from around the country who were participating in the BWH post-sophomore fellowship to develop pathology education projects. “Scott was very dedicated to promoting pathways into pathology,” said Mitchell. “He was thinking about how we teach pathology and engage medical students who don’t get that much exposure to pathology as a career. In this way, Scott was making his mark on the national stage.”

Dr. Lovitch was also recently collaborating with Brigham residents along with his wife and fellow HMS scientist, Ashwini Jambhekar, PhD, on research to understand the role of p53 proteins within hematologic malignancies. Many members of the department know her, as she was often at events with her husband.

“I remember when Scott met Ashwini while we were residents,” shared Morgan. “She was the love of his life, and we all feel very deeply for her.”

When asked how others can honor Dr. Lovitch’s life, Aster said, “Be kind, caring and empathetic. Scott was all those things in spades.”

Morgan agreed: “Scott very much cared about other human beings, and he thought deeply about the impact his diagnoses had on patients. The world would be a better place if everyone had his level of compassion towards others.”

In addition to his wife, Dr. Lovitch is survived by his sister, Gina, his parents, Joan and Jeffrey, and parents-in-law, Mangal and Rajaram Jambhekar. A memorial event for Dr. Lovitch on May 15, 4-5 p.m., in Bornstein Amphitheater, will feature keynote speaker Bernard S. Chang, MD, dean for Medical Education at HMS.