We are pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Andrea Hayes-Jordan, Byah Thomason Doxey-Sanford Doxey Distinguished Professor, and Surgeon-in-Chief of the UNC Children’s Hospital, by President Trump to the National Cancer Advisory Board.
The board consists of 18 members appointed by the President of the United States. Its role is to advise and assist the NCI Director on the activities of the National Cancer Program, including the review (second level) of grants and cooperative agreements for research and training. We are so proud to have Dr. Hayes-Jordan as the pediatric voice on the board; we know how important it is because kids need our support to fight cancer.
Dr. Hayes-Jordan is recognized as the first African-American female pediatric surgeon board-certified in the United States and is an international leader in pediatric surgery and pediatric oncology. She specializes in refractory and resistant tumors in children, specifically soft tissue sarcomas. Her work with patients with desmoplastic small round cell tumors (DSRCT), a rare sarcoma, has been groundbreaking and innovative, as she was the first surgeon to perform cytoreductive surgery and hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy (HIPEC) on pediatric patients. She is world-renowned for her work in pioneering this operation for children.
Dr. Hayes-Jordan has been an investigator on numerous grants, clinical trials, and has received funding from the National Institutes of Health with a focus on rare sarcomas. She has 100 peer-reviewed publications in top-tier journals, 13 book chapters, and has delivered over 130 presentations and invited lectures at regional, national, and international conferences, annual meetings and symposia. She is currently a member of the editorial board for the National Cancer Institute’s Pediatric Disease Query, a national committee that vets every publication on pediatric cancer and summarizes it on the NIH website. She is also a reviewer for the Annals of Surgery, Journal of Pediatric Surgery, and World Journal of Clinical Oncology, to name a few.