Christopher D.M. Fletcher, MD, FRCPath, graduated from St. Thomas’s Hospital Medical School in London and obtained postgraduate qualifications from the Royal College of Pathologists (MRCPath – 1988) and the University of London (MD – 1991) in the United Kingdom. He received his training in pathology at St. Thomas’s Hospital/United Medical & Dental Schools in London, U.K. Dr. Fletcher’s main areas of interest include the clinicopathologic and molecular genetic analyses of soft tissue tumors.
Dr. Fletcher has published extensively on the pathology of soft tissue tumors and is probably best known for his work challenging the diagnostic entities of malignant fibrous histiocytoma and hemangiopericytoma. He has also described for the first time a variety of lesions, including, among others, deep benign fibrous histiocytoma, angiomyofibroblastoma, retiform hemangioendothelioma, spindle cell liposarcoma, myoepithelial lesions of soft tissue, cellular angiofibroma and soft tissue angiofibroma. He has worked extensively on cytogenetic/morphologic correlations in soft tissue tumors. He is Chairman of the WHO Working Group on the classification of soft tissue tumours, having been senior editor of both the 2002 and most recent 2013 classifications.
Dr. Fletcher has authored more than 500 publications, including more than 375 original papers on soft tissue neoplasms and several books, among which are the two-volume Diagnostic Histopathology of Tumors, the 4th edition of which will be published in early 2013, and the 3rd series AFIP Fascicle on Soft Tissue Tumors. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, is on the editorial board of 17 international journals and was President of the Association of Directors of Anatomic and Surgical Pathology from 2003-2006. More recently he has been President of the International Society of Bone & Soft Tissue Pathology and he is currently President of the Arthur Purdy Stout Society. Before moving to the United States in 1995, Dr. Fletcher was the Director of the Soft Tissue Tumour Unit at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London and Professor of Surgical Pathology in the University of London; he is currently Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School, Director of Surgical Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts and Chief of Onco-Pathology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.