The Hannah Croasdale Award is presented to the graduating Ph.D. recipient who best exemplifies the qualities of a scholar. These individuals possess personal qualities of intellectual curiosity, dedication, and commitment to the pursuit of new knowledge, and to teaching.
The selection process for this prestigious award is never an easy task, and each year we are gratified and humbled by the scholarly excellence demonstrated across the Guarini School programs.
The research undertaken, particularly these past years when we all had to contend with the disruption of the pandemic, has been outstanding and we are delighted to recognize Joshua Levy as the 2022 Croasdale Award recipient.
Joshua Levy joined the Quantitative Biomedical Sciences program in 2018 with a BS in Physics from the University of California, Berkley where he graduated in the top 1% of his class.
This impressive track record continued at Dartmouth, where he worked under Dr. Brock Christensen who was, and I quote, "immediately impressed" by his intellectual curiosity. Christensen, who served as Joshua's thesis advisor, referred to him as "the most talented and capable doctoral student I have ever encountered."
When Joshua joined the QBS program he quickly gained a thorough understanding of data sources, pathophysiology, and histopathology, enabling him to develop new machine and deep learning approaches for image and molecular classification.
After training at the microscope with his co-mentor, Louis Vaickus in pathology at the Geisel School of Medicine, Joshua quickly went on to add a set of distinct scientific contributions in the histopathology image analysis space to his thesis work, evidence of his capability to absorb and synthesize new information with an intellectual nimbleness that is remarkable.
During his time at Dartmouth, Joshua published in two-dozen top-level journals in the fields of pathology and bioinformatics, over half of those as first author, and he has presented his work at conferences and symposia around the world.
His commitment to teaching and mentoring matches his intellectual capacity, having served as a teaching fellow in three different courses at QBS, and helping to establish the Emerging Diagnostic and Investigative Technologies (EDIT) program at Dartmouth Health. Joshua is currently an assistant professor of Pathology and Dermatology and serves as the co-director of the Machine Learning arm of the EDIT program, which over the past couple years has provided access to machine learning technologies to over 50 high school students from across the United States through virtual summer internships.
In addition to his research, Joshua has also served professionally on numerous bioinformatics initiatives including: a collaboration to develop deep learning software for rapid and accurate histological assessment of intraoperative tumor margins, serving as a statistical consultant at the Dartmouth Cancer Center, and a project at the Veterans Affairs Healthcare System in White River Junction where he consults on machine learning-based natural language processing software for suicide risk prediction.
Joshua is now assistant professor in the departments of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, and Dermatology at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.
His dedication to research and the development of collaborative teams of biomedical researchers and physician scientists, makes Joshua a most worthy recipient of the 2022 Croasdale award. Congratulations, Joshua!
