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Virgil Moon Professor of Pathology, Director, Indiana University Health Pathology Laboratories; Vice Chair, Clinical Pathology, Director, Division of Hematopathology Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, USA

Qualities of innovative thinkers? Intrinsic curiosity is a state of mind of constantly thinking about new concepts, projects and solutions that drive innovative thinkers and, over time, with enough persistence, might lead to a truly transformational contribution.

Exciting developments and trends? Precision diagnostics and its integration into precision medicine is arguably the most important development in the past decade. The scope of precision diagnostics is evolving and currently consists of genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, microbiome analysis, and pharmacogenomics. True transformation requires integration of all these components with other more routine laboratory and clinical data, and data mining to better understand the health and disease state of an individual, and to determine tailored preventative care or treatment. In addition to providing the lion’s share of diagnostic data, pathology is uniquely positioned to integrate those and develop analytical tools to further practical and personalized applications.

Book recommendation? Walter Isaacson’s “The Code Breaker.” It is a fascinating biography of Jennifer Doudna, a Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry for work on gene editing. The book chronicles Doudna’s early interests and a complex road to a groundbreaking discovery of CRISPR-Cas system.