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.”