Richard D. Carvajal, MD

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Richard Carvajal, MD, is a leader in rare melanoma research and early phase drug development. As deputy physician-in-chief and director of medical oncology at the Northwell Health Cancer Institute, Dr. Carvajal leads all hematology and medical oncology programs across Northwell’s cancer network, the largest in New York State. Dr. Carvajal is also the R. J. Zuckerberg Chair in Medical Oncology and professor of medicine at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell. “At Northwell, we see 20,000 patients with new cancer diagnoses each year,” Dr. Carvajal says. “We have this incredible opportunity and responsibility to give world-class cancer care to all of those patients. And we have the ability to do this in their backyard, so they don’t have to travel.” Dr. Carvajal’s research is based at Northwell’s Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He sees patients at R.J. Zuckerberg Cancer Center in Lake Success, and at Manhattan Eye, Ear & Throat Hospital. Dr. Carvajal received his medical degree from NYU Grossman School of Medicine. During his residency at the University of Michigan Medical Center, working with oncologists and cancer patients and seeing their close relationships sparked his interest in oncology. Additionally, he was excited by the progress being made in cancer treatments at the time. “A lot of the breakthroughs—targeted therapy, precision medicine, immunology—were really taking shape,” he says. “The ability to develop newer and better therapies that could meaningfully benefit cancer patients really appealed to me.” The desire to help develop new oncology drugs led him to complete a fellowship in medical oncology/hematology at Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) Cancer Center. “I wanted to take new therapies from the laboratory to the clinic and figure out which patients would be most likely to benefit from those new types of treatments,” Dr. Carvajal says. Prior to joining Northwell, Dr. Carvajal led the Developmental Therapeutics Service at MSK Cancer Center. He 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 authored or co-authored more than 250 peer-reviewed articles, books, and book chapters. He serves on the editorial boards of six cancer journals. 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 are seeing people who are at the forefront of this.”