Jennifer McNiff, MD, Awarded Yale Medicine Distinguished Clinical Career Award

The Yale Medicine Distinguished Clinical Career Award honors physicians who have contributed to Yale Medicine for at least 20 years since completing their fellowship training and whose careers are marked by significant accomplishments, exemplary dedication, and important contributions to advancing the practice, the overall medical profession, and the community. The award is intended to honor faculty members who are widely recognized as distinguished clinicians and who have devoted the main part of their careers to Yale.

For her entire career, Dr. McNiff has been a faculty member at Yale School of Medicine (YSM), joining in 1992 after completing her medical degree at University of Vermont and her training at the University of Virginia and Medical College of Virginia. A respected diagnostic dermatopathologist, academician, and teacher, Dr. McNiff has impacted the lives of thousands of patients and has guided clinicians in the departments of Dermatology, Medicine, and Surgery in difficult patient care decisions for decades.

From the beginning of her 33-year tenure at Yale, Dr. McNiff has been an integral member of the Departments of Dermatology and Pathology. Within four years of her arrival and while still an assistant professor, she was selected by then chairman, Richard Edelson, to become the director of the Division of Dermatopathology, a position she still holds today. While the division had always enjoyed regional recognition, the work of Dr. McNiff and her colleagues helped set Yale Dermatopathology on a path to national and international academic preeminence

Academically, Dr. McNiff has made significant contributions in wide-ranging subjects in cutaneous pathology, as evidenced by more than 150 original articles. Early in her career, she established that cutaneous lymphomatoid granulomatosis is a B-cell lymphoproliferative disorder. She is also the first to describe the superficial variant of morphea. Additionally, she described a newly recognized cutaneous soft tissue tumor, cellular digital fibroma.

In recognition of her impact on the field, in 2024, she received the Founder’s Award of the American Society of Dermatopathology, the highest international honor in dermatopathology, presented to one individual each year. Her local renown is evident in her perennial recognition as a Connecticut Magazine “Top Doctor.”

Although Dr. McNiff has many academic accomplishments, her greatest passion is teaching. She has trained more than 200 Yale residents and fellows in dermatology, pathology and dermatopathology; served as residency/fellowship director in dermatopathology; and mentored junior faculty, including many ‘rising stars’ in academic dermatopathology. She has inspired numerous trainees to follow her into this field. In 2011, Dr. McNiff received the Walter R. Nickel Award of Excellence in Teaching of Dermatopathology from the American Society of Dermatopathology, and her passion and influence are consistently reflected in exceptional local, national, and international teaching evaluations and letters of commendation.

Dr. McNiff has served on the editorial boards of multiple journals and authored numerous book chapters. She was also selected as program director, and later as president, of the American Society of Dermatopathology, and she is a regular invited speaker at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Dermatology.