The University of Arizona College of Medicine Tucson and Banner University Medical Center Tucson are pleased to welcome Melissa Rosado de Christenson, MD, FACR, FAAWR, who serves as Professor in the Department of Medical Imaging. An expert in the field of Cardiothoracic Imaging, Dr. Rosado de Christenson comes to Tucson from the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine/St. Luke’s Hospital of Kansas City where she served as Professor, Chief of Thoracic Imaging, and Director of Lung Screening.
Dr. Rosado de Christenson retired from active duty in the United States Air Force as a Colonel in 2001 after over 25 years of service. She was a member of the charter class of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, MD, where she received her Medical Degree and was commissioned as a Captain in the United States Air Force in 1980. She completed her residency in Diagnostic Radiology at the George Washington University Medical Center, Washington, DC, and became a diplomat of the American Board of Radiology in 1984. Her first assignment as a radiologist was at the 13th Air Force Medical Center, Clark Air Base, Republic of the Philippines, where she was Consultant in Radiology to the Pacific Air Force Surgeon General. Dr. Rosado de Christenson was assigned to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) in September 1988 as Chief of Pulmonary and Mediastinal Radiology and became Chairman and Registrar of the Department of Radiologic Pathology in 1995. She is the first woman and the first Air Force officer ever to serve in this capacity since the establishment of the department in 1947.
Dr. Rosado de Christenson served as Chief of Pulmonary and Mediastinal Radiology and Chair of Radiologic Pathology at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, (AFIP) for more than thirteen years and trained over 20,000 radiologists, residents, and other physicians who attended AFIP courses. She subsequently served as a Clinical Professor of Radiology at the Ohio State University, and as Professor of Radiology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and Chief of Thoracic Radiology and Director of Lung Screening in the Department of Radiology at Saint Luke’s Hospital of Kansas City.
Named Fellow of the ACR in 1999, Dr. Rosado de Christenson received the American Association for Women Radiologists (AAWR) Marie Sklodowska-Curie Award in 2004. In 2010 she received the American Roentgen Ray Society’s (ARRS) Best Educator Award. In 2016 she received the AAWR’s Alice Ettinger Award and became an inaugural Fellow of the AAWR in 2017. In 2018, Dr. Rosado de Christenson was awarded the Society of Thoracic Radiology’s Gold Medal Lifetime Achievement Award as well as the American Roentgen Ray Society’s Gold Medal, the highest honors awarded by these societies for distinguished service to radiology.
Dr. Rosado de Christenson has published on the subject of radiologic-pathologic correlation of thoracic diseases and is particularly interested in the pathologic basis of chest imaging abnormalities. She has been a featured speaker in national and international radiology meetings and a visiting professor at universities throughout the United States and abroad. She is Past-President of the American Association for Women Radiologists (AAWR), the Asociación de Radiología Torácica Latinoamericana (ARTLA), the American Roentgen Ray Society (ARRS), and the Society of Thoracic Radiology (STR).