Biography of M. Halit Pinar, MD

Born in 1950, M. Halit Pinar is the Director of Perinatal and Pediatric Pathology at Women and Infants Hospital of Rhode Island and Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Alpert School of Medicine of Brown University.

Dr. Pinar graduated from TED Ankara College, a private high school with an English curriculum in Ankara, capital of the Turkish Republic. He then attended Ankara University Medical School. His main ambition in life since his elementary school years was to be in the best he can in the and best and most challenging environment in whatever topic he decided to study. Not surprisingly, this path took him to the United States. Just before this major step, he married his sweetheart co-worker from the Turkish Radio and Television Company's Intelligence Unit where he was moonlighting to save money for a trip to UK.

He spent his first year in the United States at Grady Memorial Hospital of Emory University completing a rotating internship (1977). After completion of this internship he started an anatomic pathology residency at New York University Medical Center, which included the New York University Hospital, Bellevue and Manhattan VA Hospital. After spending a grueling three years, he decided to leave Pathology and New York and started a General Pediatrics Residency at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire (1981). In four years he was Board Certified in General Pediatrics and Board Eligible in Neonatal and Perinatal Medicine (1985). After spending some time in Turkey fulfilling his military obligation, before returning to the States he formed and led a team who built the first modern neonatal intensive care unit in a brand new hospital (International Hospital) in Istanbul. Upon his return, he started a fellowship in Perinatal and Pediatric Pathology at Women and Infants Hospital of Rhode Island affiliated with Brown Medical School (1990). During his fellowship, he had the opportunity to work in Dr. Nancy Thompson's Laboratory and with her mentorship he learned the tools of molecular biology and applied them in various projects. After completing his fellowship, after an academic search, he was appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in the same hospital.

Finally finding his calling under the mentorship of Dr. Don Singer, he started to advance in his career. Then he became the Director of the fellowship program in 1995 and held this position until 2006. He was promoted to the Directorship of the Division in 1997. He was promoted to the rank of Associated Professor in 2001. He was a full professor in 2005. He was 55 years old.

Dedicating his life to Perinatal Pathology, he was always in search of better and more efficient ways of learning and teaching. As a believer in the power of visual methods of presenting knowledge, he started to illustrate his syllabi with original diagrams. Some of his illustrations he used for the two clinical electives he is directing received praise from the students and colleagues. He also authored the handbooks for the Fellowship and Residency programs at Brown University. Over the years he wrote numerous chapters in different textbooks and he has more than 50 published articles and many invited talks and other lectures.

In 2003 he and his colleague, then the Director of Maternal and Fetal Medicine at Women and Infants Hospital, had applied to an RFA (request for application) about forming a network to study the causes and factors contributing to stillbirth. Later that year they found out that they were awarded the grant and Dr. Pinar became the sole and lead pathologist responsible from organizing and setting up the necessary network to satisfy the overarching hypotheses about the contribution of standardized postmortem and placental examination in elucidating these unknown matters.

Placenta has always been the forgotten organ. It is transient and when its function is complete it is discarded. It had been very difficult to create a working in vitro model and there are many different types in nature. Primates have placentas similar to humans but obviously in vivo experiments using them have been impractical. So the investigators have been working with the placentas of other species, such as rats, mice or simply in vitro trophoblastic cell cultures.

Other events occurring concurrently were the great strides assisted reproductive technologies (ART) were taking and emergence of early data linking prenatal events to postnatal morbidity such as growth impairment, bronchopulmonary dysplasia and cerebral palsy. While trying to read about the normal developmental biology of the human placenta, it became obvious that despite the availability of numerous scientific articles, a source that succinctly reviewed these topics were lacking.

This is when Dr. Pinar decided to form the Core Curriculum Publishers and after a three year effort wrote the first volume of a series dedicated to Perinatal Sciences.