UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center Magazine Fall 2016 | Page 20
center profile
“Helping others
advance is the
most rewarding
part of my job.
Helping young
faculty get their
first grant, get
promoted and
become the best
surgeon they
can be is very
rewarding. That
puts a smile on
my face and
reminds me why
I come to work
every morning.”
18
U A B
often asked to see patients who have very difficult
problems – advanced cancers, extremely large tumors,
people who have exhausted all other therapies,” Dr.
Chen says. “Surgery is still the most effective therapy
for cancer, but we recognize what the limitations of
surgery are. Seeing patients with difficult problems
stimulates us to think of ways in not only how we can
help this patient at this time, but also how we can
help the patients we’ll never meet.
“For instance, can we find a better way to
perform an operation that would not only benefit the
patient here, but also the hundreds or thousands of
patients someplace else by us doing the research and
publishing it. We can thereby help that patient we
never meet through discovery.”
When Dr. Chen was being recruited to UAB,
he was particularly interested in being part of the
leadership of the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center,
which led to his joining the senior leadership team
as a senior advisor to director Edward Partridge,
M.D. “From the patient care perspective, surgery is
the mainstay of treatment for many patients,” Dr.
Chen says. “The surgical research we do, the surgical
education we do, plays a big part in the Cancer
Center’s overall mission.”
Dr. Chen hopes to expand the Cancer Center’s
multidisciplinary efforts in endocrine cancers, which
are becoming more and more prevalent across the
United States. He is also passionate about, and devotes
a great amount of time to, teaching residents, medical
students and other trainees to be the next generation
of surgeons.
“Helping others advance is the most rewarding
part of my job,” Dr. Chen says. “Helping young
faculty get their first grant, get promoted and become
the best surgeon they can be is very rewarding. That
puts a smile on my face and reminds me why I come
to work every morning.
C O M P R E H E N S I V E
C A N C E R
C E N T E R
“If we provide the next generation of surgeons
with the knowledge and best training, we’ve made a
bigger impact than just taking care of the patient we
see in clinic. Our contributions will go beyond that
one patient.”
A Bold Vision
Dr. Chen sees a tremendous amount of potential
for both the Cancer Center and for UAB’s surgery
department. He hopes to build on the already solid
foundation of success of both.
“This department has a storied history and made
a number of important contributions to American
medicine, American surgery, to Birmingham and to
Alabama,” he says. “We have the capacity do more
and be one of the top surgery departments in the
nation in all areas. We should have some of the most
robust and renowned clinical programs in the country.
We should be in the top 10 for research. From the
education standpoint, we should have residencies and
fellowships so that everyone wants to train here. Do
we have some of that now? Yes, we do. My goal is to
see that become more uniform throughout our whole
department.”
UAB and the Cancer Center provide a perfect
environment for Dr. Chen to do that. “We have a
great medical center, great people, great infrastructure
and a great city in Birmingham. We have a large
patient population who need our help, and the
community is tremendously supportive. We are at a
point where we have the capacity to make UAB the
place to come for medical care, for people to train,
for people to conduct research. It’s up to us to execute
on that, because everything is there to make that
happen.”
So that question – Why UAB? – is one that Dr.
Chen hopes will not be asked as much in the future.
Instead, it will be: “Of course, UAB.”