Core Leader, Hope Babette Tang (1983) Histology Facility
Contact Information
Kathy Cormier and her team at the Hope Babette Tang (1983) Histology Facility strive to meet the routine, varied and unusual requests and samples from the Koch Institute and across campus. They offer brightfield digital slide scanning, immunohistoochemcial staining, histochemical staining, paraffin processing and sectioning, cryosectioning, hematoxylin and eosin staining and training for paraffin and cryosectioning. Cormier offers guidance to researchers on study design, process, and what the Histology Facility can do to meet research needs.
After Cormier received her bachelor’s degree in animal science from the University of Massachusetts, she worked at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where she did diabetes research. She then shifted to clinical work, first at the Histology Lab at the UMass Medical School and then as a histology manager at Heywood Hospital. At the hospital, she trained and worked as a pathologist assistant and grossed in all surgical specimens received from the operating room, as well as learning many techniques from the cytologists and medical technologists while there. Next, she worked many years as the histology manager at the Division of Comparative Medicine at MIT. After a short period at a contract research organization, she returned to MIT in the Histology Facility at the Koch Institute. Cormier is an American Society of Clinical Pathology certified HT Histology Technician, and a member of the National Society of Histotechnology, Massachusetts Society of Histotechnology, and Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities.