The Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology is remembering Richard D. Brunning, who headed the department’s Hematopathology Division for 33 years. Brunning passed away in his Minnetonka home December 9. His Minnesota StarTribune obituary is here.

Brunning joined the department in 1965 after earning an MD. degree from the McGill University in Montreal, Canada and completing a hematopathology residency in LMP.  Over more than three decades until his retirement in 1998, Brunning established himself as a leading hematopathologist and an international authority on bone marrow pathology, authoring more than 100 scientific publications and 21 book chapters.  He was coauthor with his LMP colleague Robert McKenna of Tumors of the Bone Marrow: An Atlas of Tumor Pathology, published by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in 1994, and The World Health Organization (WHO) classification of the myeloid neoplasms he published with two fellow hematopathologists in the journal Blood in 2002.

Richard Brunning “was the international leader in bone marrow pathology for the last quarter of the 20th century,” McKenna said.  “No one contributed more or trained more subsequent leaders in the field. That is clearly his legacy.”

McKenna was Hematopathogy Division Director and held the Brunning Professorship until his retirement in 2015.  Earlier this year, Michael Linden, the current Hematopathology Division Director, was named to the Brunning Professorship, which is meant to attract and/or retain an outstanding senior faculty member who will provide academic and research leadership in hematopathology. 

View Richard D. Brunning’s LMP “Legends in Pathology” video.