Contact: Vicky Agnew (843) 697-6208
New Haven, Conn. — Thomas J. Lynch Jr., M.D., director of Yale Cancer Center and physician-in-chief of Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven, will leave Yale in August to become chairman and chief executive officer of the Massachusetts General Physicians Organization.
Peter Schulam, M.D., Ph.D., professor of urology and chair/chief of Yale’s Department of Urology will serve as the interim director of Yale Cancer Center and physician-in-chief at Smilow.
Lynch joined Yale Cancer Center as director in 2009 and assumed the role of inaugural physician-in-chief at Smilow which opened that year. Under his leadership, more than 130 scientists and clinicians joined the institutions, new-patient volume grew from 3,500 to 9,000 through key affiliations, and participation in therapeutic clinical trials grew by
325 percent.
During his tenure, the center renewed its NCI Comprehensive Cancer Center Grant, and joined the NCI’s National Clinical Trials Network and the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, an alliance of cancer centers that develops national treatment guidelines. He also fostered the research of more than 300 cancer center members with more than $127 million in funding from the NCI and other sources.
Schulam joined in 2012 as inaugural chief of the Department of Urology at Yale-New Haven Hospital and chair of the department at Yale School of Medicine where he has established a multidisciplinary team in urologic oncology. He has implemented a program for MRI-fusion guided biopsy of prostate cancer and leads a research program focused on prostate cancer imaging. In addition, he co-founded the Yale Center for Biomedical and Interventional Technology.