2024 Board of Directors Election Nominees
Joseph J. Passarelli
Candidate - Treasurer
Joseph Passarelli retired in 2024 after a career at Roche Diagnostics that spanned almost 40 years. In his latest role and for several years, Joe represented Roche as a scientific liaison to professional societies and standard- and guideline-setting organizations worldwide. He has worked both domestically and internationally in research and development and has experience in discovery, research, development, laboratory management, technology transfer, regulatory submissions, and market commercialization. His scientific background included developing immunoassays that used multiple technologies for homogenous laboratory-based testing platforms. He is recognized in the fields of drugs of abuse testing and therapeutic drug monitoring. Before this latest role, Mr. Passarelli was head of Roche Diagnostics Research and Development for these scientific disciplines.
Mr. Passarelli has been active with CLSI for several years, having participated on the document development committees for the EP05, EP06, EP07, EP09, and EP17 revisions. In addition, he was a member of the Consensus Committee on Clinical Chemistry and Toxicology and the Consensus Council. In addition to his collaboration with CLSI, Mr. Passarelli served in various leadership roles with the International Federation of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (IFCC) and the Association for Diagnostics and Laboratory Medicine (ADLM). He is passionate about educating and promoting the value of standardization and harmonization using recognized standards and guidelines and collaborates extensively with professional organizations worldwide.
Randall T. Hayden, MD
Candidate - Director, Professions Constituency
Dr. Hayden is Director of the Division of Clinical Pathology and Global Pathology, Director of Clinical and Molecular Microbiology, and Director of Pathology Informatics in the Department of Pathology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, USA. His research interests focus on the application of molecular methods to diagnostic challenges in clinical microbiology, with particular emphasis on the diagnosis of infections in the immunocompromised host. He is editor-in-chief of Diagnostic Microbiology of the Immunocompromised Host, 2nd Edition, and co-editor of Molecular Microbiology, Diagnostic Principles and Practice, 3rd Edition and Medically Important Fungi, 6th Edition, and section editor for the Manual of Clinical Microbiology, 12th Edition—all from ASM Press. He serves as associate editor for the Journal of Clinical Microbiology. He is past-president of the Pan-American Society for Clinical Virology (PASCV), and has worked extensively in laboratory capacity building efforts worldwide, including work through the St. Jude Global Pathology Program, as well as collaborative work with CLSI.
Zahra Shajani-Yi, PhD
Candidate, Industry Constituency
Zahra Shajani-Yi, PhD, DABCC, FADLM, is Senior Technical Director and Clinical Chemist at Labcorp and serves nationally as Discipline Director for Routine Immunoassays. Prior to joining Labcorp, she was Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology, Microbiology, and Immunology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine with clinical responsibilities as Associate Medical Director of Clinical Chemistry and Medical Director of Esoteric Chemistry at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, in Nashville Tennessee.
Dr. Shajani-Yi earned her BSc in Chemistry from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver British Columbia, and PhD in Chemistry from the University of Washington in Seattle. She completed a Clinical Chemistry Fellowship at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. She is a Diplomate of the American Board of Clinical Chemistry (DABCC), a Fellow of the Academy of Diagnostics and Laboratory Medicine (FADLM), board-certified by the National Registry of Certified Chemists (NRCC) and Clinical Chemist (Director) by the California Department of Public Health.
Dr Shajani-Yi is an active member of several professional organizations and currently serves as a Council Member for the Academy of Diagnostics and Laboratory Medicine, as chair of the Academy’s Guidance Document committee, is a member of ADLM’s ACCENT Review Board, and a member of the College of American Pathology (CAP) Instrumentation Committee.
Dr. Shajani-Yi’s research and clinical interests are in endocrinology, sickle cell disease and hemoglobinopathies, laboratory practice guidance documents and assay interferences. She has co-authored more than forty peer-reviewed manuscripts, book chapters and guidelines as Dr. Shajani and Dr. Shajani-Yi.
Collette Fitzgerald, PhD
Candidate - Director, Government Constituency
Dr. Collette Fitzgerald is the Acting Associate Director for Science (ADS) in the newly formed Office of Laboratory Systems and Response (OLSR) at CDC. She began her career in microbiology 32 years ago, across the pond, at the Health Protection Agency in London, where she gained a love for the laboratory and public health.
For the past 26 years, she has worked at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta, GA. Eighteen of those years were spent working in the Enteric Diseases Laboratory Branch in the Division of Foodborne, Waterborne and Environmental Diseases, where she served as Chief of the National Enteric Reference and Outbreak Laboratory Team (NERO). Dr Fitzgerald’s strong leadership led NERO to enhance laboratory quality and safety, embrace whole genome sequencing (WGS) and Quality Management Systems (QMS).
In 2017, Dr. Fitzgerald joined the Division of Laboratory Systems (DLS) at CDC, where she led the Science and Evaluation Offices in the Office of the Director, in support of the DLS mission to improve public health, patient outcomes, and health equity by advancing clinical and public health laboratory quality and safety, data and biorepository science, and workforce competency. Since 2023 she has served as the Acting ADS in the Center for Laboratory Systems and Response, and is excited to move into a new acting ADS role in OLSR in Oct 2024 to support its mission to create a core laboratory infrastructure that provides operational and systems support to CDC and the nation’s public health and clinical laboratories.
Dr. Fitzgerald is currently CDC’S ex-officio on the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Advisory Committee (CLIAC), was a Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) Consensus Council board member (Nov 2019- Dec 2021) and has served on the CLSI Board of Directors since January 2022.
Dr. Fitzgerald earned her PhD in Molecular Microbiology from the University of Lancaster, UK, and a Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry with Chemistry from the University of Southampton, UK.
