GRAHAM — Alamance Community College hosted its first-ever histotechnology workshop as approximately 20 professionals from around the United States gathered in the college’s Biotechnology Center of Excellence.
Histotechnology is a science centered on the microscopic detection of tissue abnormalities for disease diagnosis and the treatment. ACC’s two-year program trains students to prepare tissue specimens for microscopic examination and identification.
The “Getting Smarter Again” workshop April 17-18, sponsored by Sakura Finetek, a worldwide manufacturer of histology equipment, brought lab managers and pathology assistants from such locations as Duke University, Michigan, Florida and even Colombia, South America, to learn workflow strategies and gain continuing education credits toward their credentials.
Workshop activities were designed to be fun while teaching lessons for the participants to take back to their respective laboratories and work associates. For example, a variety of instructional games using Legos and squishy balls led Joshua Greenlee, a Sakura employee from Arizona with 20 years of laboratory and histotechnology-related experience, to talk about changing perspective to workflow and changing from small batch to large batch in laboratories.
“All the workshop participants work in manual, large-batch kind of workflow that can be inefficient,” Greenlee said. “The folks here are from different leadership positions from around the laboratory world, and they have come to this workshop to learn a different way and try to gain some efficiencies in the lab by changing the workflow in the processes that they use.”
Alamance Community College’s state-of-the-art histotechnology department, along with the biotechnology and medical lab technology programs, were the beneficiaries of a $1 million gift from Labcorp Inc. in recent years that was used to purchase high-tech equipment and supplies.
For more information about ACC’s Histotechnology associate degree program, contact Federico Lin, histotechnology coordinator, at 336-506-4348 or fjlin425@alamancecc.edu.
