Richard D. Carvajal, MD

Description

Richard Carvajal, MD, is the R. J. Zuckerberg Chair in Medical Oncology, professor of medicine at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, and a world leader and pioneer in melanoma research and early phase drug development. As deputy physician-in-chief and director of hematology and medical oncology at the Northwell Cancer Institute, Dr. Carvajal leads all hematology and medical oncology programs across Northwell's cancer network, the largest in New York State. At Northwell, we see over 20, 000 patients with new cancer diagnoses each year, Dr. Carvajal says. This gives us both the enormous responsibility as well as an incredible opportunity to provide the very best cancer care to each of these patients and their loved ones. With our outstanding faculty members working in comprehensive, multidisciplinary cancer centers throughout New York and Connecticut, we are able to provide this care for our patients in the comfort of their own neighborhoods, without the need to travel for cutting-edge cancer care. Dr. Carvajal's research is based at Northwell's Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he is an associate clinical member of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Cancer Center. He sees patients at R.J. Zuckerberg Cancer Center in Lake Success, and at Manhattan Eye, Ear & Throat Hospital. He is an investigator of START Center for Cancer Research, renowned for being the largest global network of fully dedicated, early-phase oncology clinical trial programs.Dr. Carvajal received his medical degree from the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. His interest in pursuing a career in oncology was sparked during his residency at the University of Michigan Medical Center, when he worked with cancer patients and saw first-hand the close relationships they developed with their oncologists. Additionally, he was excited by the progress being made in cancer treatments at the time. A lot of the breakthroughs targeted therapy, precision oncology, immune-oncology were really taking shape, he says. The ability to develop newer, more effective and better tolerated therapies for cancer patients really appealed to me. The desire to help develop new therapies for patients with cancer led him to complete a fellowship in medical oncology/hematology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. I wanted to take new discoveries from the laboratory, bring them to the clinic, and figure out which patients would most likely benefit from new types of treatments, Dr. Carvajal says. Prior to joining Northwell, Dr. Carvajal led the Developmental Therapeutics Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and then served as director of Experimental Therapeutics and director of the Melanoma Service at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, as well as co-lead of the Precision Oncology and Systems Biology Program at the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center.Dr. Carvajal has been the principal investigator or co-investigator of over 500 clinical trials and has authored or co-authored more than 250 peer-reviewed articles, books and book chapters. His research has been supported by the National Cancer Institute, the Food and Drug Administration, the Conquer Cancer Foundation, the Melanoma Research Alliance, the Melanoma Research Foundation and the Empire Clinical Research Investigator Program.Dr. Carvajal remains excited about the ongoing breakthroughs in cancer care and the access that Northwell patients have to clinical trials. Now is such a promising time in this field, he says. There are new therapies being discovered, developed and approved all the time at an incredibly rapid rate. For patients with cancer, it's really important that they treated at an institution like ours which is at the forefront of this progress.