Dr. Jita (Jitakshi) De
M.D. (Doctor of Medicine)
M.L.S. (Master of Legal Studies in Healthcare Law)
Founding Pathologist and Scientist, Entrepreneur
Dr. Jitakshi (Jita) De received her undergraduate education at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) where she earned a Bachelors of Science in Biology with Highest Honors (class of 1994). For her undergraduate research thesis in Kerry Bloom’s lab, she identified kinetochore mutants in the S. cerevisiae yeast model by applying the dicentric chromosome breakage assay.
She received her medical education at Duke University (class of 1999), where she was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Student Research Fellow (’97-’98) at the Laboratory of Signal Transduction in National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. There, she discovered an unusual CCCH class of zinc finger protein in Xenopus laevis.
Dr. De pursued post-doctoral research studies in Ruben Carbonell lab at the Kenan Institute of Engineering, Technology, and Science at NC State University, in collaboration with Sandia National Laboratory. This research led to the discovery of target-specific binding peptides for the Staphylococcal bacterial enterotoxin from a combinatorial (bead-based) synthetic hexamer peptide library.
In further post-doctoral research, she sought to use target specific peptides for elimination of Mycoplasma infection from mammalian cell cultures, using a bead-conjugated capture peptide, at the Center of Biomedical Inventions (University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center).
She did her pathology (AP/CP) residency at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, and her Hematopathology fellowship at the University of Michigan in 2009. After practicing with a focus on hematopathology in various commercial laboratory settings, she pursued graduate studies in U.S. Healthcare Law (online), attaining a Master of Legal Studies (M.L.S.) from The University of Oklahoma (2017-18).
Jita De, MD, MLS has more than 10 years of experience in the practice of pathology, with specialization in the diagnosis of blood and bone marrow malignancies. She has served in leadership roles for moderate and high complexity laboratory testing. Dr. De is an expert in blood and bone marrow pathology, with analysis and interpretation of flow cytometry data.
Her detailed case studies and research in acute and chronic leukemias, myeloid malignancies, classical Hodgkin lymphoma, and non-Hodgkin’s B cell lymphoma have been published in peer-reviewed abstracts and publications.
Dr. De is a Fellow of the American Society of Clinical Pathology (ASCP) and the College of American Pathologists.
