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Dr. Richard Van Etten is a fellowship-trained UCI Health hematologist and oncologist who specializes in the treatment of leukemia and other blood disorders. As director of the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, he leads a team of more than 200 physicians, scientists and other health science professionals. His research lab studies the pathogenesis and therapy of human blood cancers, with particular emphasis on myeloid and lymphoid neoplasms that are associated with
dysregulated tyrosine kinases.
As a medical student and doctoral candidate in biophysics at Stanford University, Van Etten worked on the molecular genetics of mammalian mitochondrial DNA with biochemist David A. Clayton, PhD. After postgraduate training in internal medicine and hematology at Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston, he was a postdoctoral fellow under Nobel laureate David Baltimore, PhD, at the Whitehead Institute in Boston.
Van Etten went on to become a physician at Brigham & Women's Hospital and a faculty member in the departments of genetics and medicine at Harvard Medical School until 2003, when he joined Tufts University as professor of medicine. At Tufts, he held several positions, including leader of the Hematologic Malignancies Program and member of the graduate programs in Genetics, Immunology, & Molecular/Cellular Physiology at Tufts University. He assumed his first cancer center leadership role at Tufts Cancer Center in 2007 as acting associate director for clinical sciences and was appointed director in 2009.
Van Etten became director of the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center on Oct. 1, 2013.