Welcome message from the chief

Here at UC Irvine’s Division of Surgical Oncology, our expert faculty members care for patients with the entire spectrum of malignancies, concentrating in particular on breast, endocrine, gastrointestinal, melanoma and sarcoma cancers, providing medical students, residents and fellows with rich educational experiences.

We work closely with our colleagues in Hematolgy/Oncology and Radiation Oncology at the UC Irvine Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, the only National Cancer Institute-designed comprehensive cancer center in Orange County and one of only 48 in the United States.

The division provides leadership for two multidisciplinary centers of excellence: the UC Irvine Health Breast Health Center and the UC Irvine Health Melanoma Center, both located within the cancer center at UC Irvine Medical Center, Orange County's only university hospital complex.

In addition to our high-volume melanoma program, our experienced surgical oncologists specialize in thyroid and parathyroid cancer.

We also collaborate with the Orthopaedic Division of Oncology as a referral center for the treatment of sarcoma and with the Department of Surgery’s internationally acclaimed Division of Minimally Invasive Surgery to develop alternatives to open surgery in the treatment of many cancers.

Residents and fellows receive extensive clinical and technical experience in all aspects of surgical oncology, as well as exposure to basic scientific research in each disease and participation in the latest clinical trials.

In addition, our comprehensive clerkship program offers the opportunity to evaluate patients at the UC Irvine Health Breast Center. Residents and medical students rotating through the Surgical Oncology service receive a syllabus at the start of the rotation and additional educational material chosen by the faculty.

The goal of the Division of Surgical Oncology is not only to provide state-of-the-art care for our cancer patients and the best possible training for our residents and fellows, but also to develop more targeted, less toxic therapies.

The division has a mature translational research program in the early diagnosis of cancers and also in monitoring treatment effects in the neoadjuvant setting, in collaboration with the world-class Beckman Laser Institute and the John Tu and Thomas Yuen Center for Functional Onco Imaging.

From a clinical standpoint, we actively enroll our patients in our own institutional research protocols as well as in national protocols sponsored by the Southwest Oncology Group and the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project.