UT Health Sciences News – Building an NCI-Designated Cancer Center: Lessons from a Leader Who’s Done It

When Roy Jensen, MD, steps to the podium August 31 as the keynote speaker at this year's Tennessee Statewide Cancer Collaborative scientific meeting in Nashville, he'll be speaking to a city he knows intimately. He lived there for roughly 24 years, earning his medical degree at Vanderbilt University, completing his residency and fellowship training, and later returning to the Vanderbilt faculty after a research stint at the National Cancer Institute. He stayed on faculty until 2004, the year he left for a job that would come to define his career: director of The University of Kansas Cancer Center.

Jessica Snowden, MD, vice chancellor for Research at UT Health Sciences and organizer of the meeting, deliberately sought out Dr. Jensen to headline this year's event, themed "From Discovery to Impact: Accelerating Cancer Solutions for Tennessee." Her reasoning was straightforward: UT Health Sciences is pursuing the same milestone Dr. Jensen chased and ultimately reached not once, but twice: designation as a National Cancer Institute (NCI) cancer center in 2012, followed by the far more demanding comprehensive designation in 2022. Few people in the country understand that climb as well as he does.

Read more on the UT Health Sciences News website.