Laura Esserman is a surgeon and

breast cancer Breast cancer is cancer that develops from breast tissue. Signs of breast cancer may include a lump in the breast, a change in breast shape, dimpling of the skin, milk rejection, fluid coming from the nipple, a newly inverted nipple, or a re ...

oncology specialist. She is the director of the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center at the

University of California, San Francisco The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is a public land-grant research university in San Francisco, California. It is part of the University of California system and is dedicated entirely to health science and life science. It cond ...

School of Medicine. She leads the I-SPY trials, Athena Breast Health Network and the WISDOM study. Esserman is an inductee in the Giants of Cancer Care, 2018, for Cancer Diagnostics and the “less is more” approach. She performs live in the show “Audacity” which she co-created. She is also known as the “singing surgeon” for singing to her patients as they go under anesthesia.

Early life and education

Laura Esserman was born in Chicago, daughter of Charlene and Ron Esserman. She is one of four children. The Esserman family relocated to Miami, where her father was a car dealer and her mother a teacher. Esserman had an early interest in science which she pursued working in a research lab at the University of Miami during her high school years. Esserman attended college at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

and completed medical school

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

. After finishing a postdoctoral fellowship in breast oncology at Stanford and earning a master's degree at the

Stanford Graduate School of Business The Stanford Graduate School of Business (also known as Stanford GSB) is the graduate business school of Stanford University, a private research university in Stanford, California. For several years it has been the most selective business schoo ...

, Esserman joined the faculty at

UCSF Medical Center The University of California, San Francisco Medical Center is a research and teaching hospital in San Francisco, California and is the medical center of the University of California, San Francisco. It is affiliated with the UCSF School of Medi ...

in 1993.

Work and research

Esserman is the director of the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center. She believes that some patients with a type of breast cancer,

ductal carcinoma in situ Ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), also known as intraductal carcinoma, is a pre-cancerous or non-invasive cancerous lesion of the breast. DCIS is classified as Stage 0. It rarely produces symptoms or a breast lump one can feel, typically being d ...

, should be placed on active surveillance instead of undergoing a biopsy, mastectomy or lumpectomy. Dr. Esserman is one of the most vocal proponents of the idea that breast cancer screening brings with it overdiagnosis and overtreatment. In July 2020, Esserman was awarded two grants: * NIH/NCI R01 Grant, $9.1M, to expand the WISDOM Study to Diverse and Underserved Patient Populations * NIH T-32 training grant for Surgical Oncology, as the Principal Investigator with the UCSF Department of Surgery

Honors and awards

Esserman was named in ''

TIME Magazine ''Time'' (stylized in all caps) is an American news magazine based in New York City. For nearly a century, it was published weekly, but starting in March 2020 it transitioned to every other week. It was first published in New York City on Mar ...

s 100 most influential people in the world in 2016. She was a speaker at the first Time 100 Health Summit on October 17, 2019. In 2019, she was awarded the Simon M. Shubitz Cancer Award and Lectureship from the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

for her significant contributions to the study of cancer. She was honored by OncLive for Giants of Cancer Care, 2018, Cancer Diagnosis. In 2020, Esserman received the Brinker Award for Scientific Distinction in Clinical Research from Susan G. Komen, breast cancer organization.

The Esserman Family Foundation and the Esserman-Knight Journalism Awards

In February 2020, Ron and Charlene Esserman established The Esserman Family Fund for Investigative Journalism at the Miami Foundation. Their donation of $2.5 million, in partnership with The Knight Foundation, will help fund prizes for investigative or accountability in reporting and a fellowship for early-career reporting at the Miami Herald. Laura Esserman said, “Particularly when journalism is under attack and when a lot of newspapers, especially local newspapers, are in financial trouble, it’s really important that new business models be found and established to support local journalism. Without that reporting, people aren’t going to know about what’s going on in their community and if we don’t have an educated electorate, we’re going to lose our democracy.” Monique O. Madan, immigration reporter, and Taylor Dolven, tourism reporter and colleagues, share first place in the 2021 Esserman-Knight Journalism Awards. Madan's reporting lead to the release of a Cuban detainee in ICE custody for eleven years. Dolven's reporting showed that covid outbreaks on cruise ships more common than the companies reported and documented the conditions of the workers forced to stay aboard the ships at sea for months.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Esserman, Laura J Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American women physicians American surgeons Women surgeons American oncologists Women oncologists People from San Francisco Healthcare in the San Francisco Bay Area Harvard University alumni Stanford University School of Medicine alumni 21st-century American women