His continuing association with Stanford began in 1968 when David Korn, the newly appointed Chairman of Pathology, recruited both Dr. Kempson and Dr. Ron Dorfman as associate professors to serve as co-directors of Surgical Pathology, in what he often described as an effort to obtain the Mercedes-Benz of surgical pathology for Stanford. Dick was promoted to full professor in 1974.

Once at Stanford he and Ron Dorfman developed a world class training program in Surgical Pathology culminating in the highly competitive Surgical Pathology fellowship. Over the years, Stanford Surgical Pathology became known for a distinctive educational bias which included a focus on the relevance of histopathological distinctions to patient management, an emphasis on morphologic differential diagnosis with, again, a separation of the clinically relevant from the academic, a willingness to tackle difficult gray zone areas and, in the face of substantial uncertainty take a diagnostic stand. The products of the Stanford Surgical Pathology division have populated numerous academic departments across the United States.

Dr. Kempson has served on the editorial board of many of the major journals in surgical pathology including the American Journal of Surgical Pathology, Modern Pathology and Cancer. He has long been concerned with postgraduate education in pathology. His long-standing activity in the USCAP culminated in his election to the organization’s presidency in 1996. He is also a past president of the Arthur Purdy Stout Society (1996). Since his arrival at Stanford he has been actively involved in the South Bay Pathology Society.

Dr. Kempson’s research interests fall into several groups. In gynecological pathology he has had a long-standing interest in uterine mesenchymal proliferations and the use of carefully specified criteria to sort them into managerially relevant groups. His were among the first publications to use mitotic index as a basis for stratifying uterine sarcomas. In recent years this approach has been expanded to make sense of the uterine smooth muscle neoplasms. Early in his career, Dr. Kempson was concerned with the alarming extent to which atypical endometrial proliferations were being labelled malignant in the absence of convincing evidence that they were clinically malignant. This led to a series of studies elucidating the natural history of endometrial carcinoma and its variants and drawing attention to a variety of benign mimics of carcinoma. His organized and practical approach to the diagnosis of gynecological diseases is to be found in the major textbooks of surgical pathology.

Dr. Kempson has made substantial contributions to the subject of soft tissue pathology. He was instrumental in popularizing the unifying concept of fibrous histiocytoma and has authored classic papers on atypical fibroxanthoma and a number of malignant fibrous histiocytoma variants. He has clarified the diagnostic criteria for fatty tumors. He is the senior author of the AFIP Soft Tissue Fascicle. Other interests include breast pathology, gastrointestinal stromal tumors and medical diseases of the kidney.

Dr. Kempson has been instrumental in rethinking some of the foundational issues in diagnostic pathology relating to tumor classification. He has consistently stressed the importance of clearly stated morphologic criteria for disease entities and has insisted on the importance of clinical outcome in establishing the relevance of morphologic distinctions. He has long believed that the conventional distinctions of “benign” and “malignant” are inadequate to capture the clinically useful categories that physicians employ in their practice. In this spirit, he has pioneered a number of important managerial concepts: the tumor of uncertain malignant potential for which no dogmatic statement about expected clinical behavior is possible and the tumor of “low malignant potential” about which one can be sure that the failure rate is low and therefore a tumor for which something less than radical therapy is appropriate.

Dr. Kempson is very active on the national and international speaking circuit and has held numerous visiting professorships both in this country and abroad. His very popular presentations all have the distinctive Kempsonian stamp described above combined with an abiding sympathy for the plight of the overworked, non-academic pathologist and his/her need for a practical, short summary of the relevance of new material to his/ her day-to-day practice.

Dr. Kempson has approached the study of history, travel, opera and wine with the same thoroughness and compulsiveness as he approaches diagnostic pathology. Notoriously, the characteristic Kempsonian Socratic exchange over the multi-headed scope begins with a grilling on the clinico-pathologic facts of the case under discussion and terminally drifts into an exploration of the trainees understanding of the country houses of England, the comings and goings of the Civil War military campaigns or the memorable Bordeaux vintages.