Reshma Jagsi, MD, DPhil

Dr. Jagsi completed undergraduate and medical training at Harvard University and her second doctorate in social policy at the University of Oxford as a Marshall Scholar. She also served as a fellow in the Center for Ethics at Harvard University and completed her residency at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Radiation Oncology Program.

An internationally recognized clinical trialist and health services researcher, Dr. Jagsi's medical research focuses on improving the quality of care received by patients with breast cancer, both by advancing the ways in which breast cancer is treated with radiation and by advancing the understanding of patient decision-making, cost, and access to appropriate care. Her research in this area is funded by an NIH R01 grant to evaluate an intervention to help support women with breast cancer and their physicians to make high quality decisions. She is also supported by the Susan G. Komen Foundation to lead research on inflammatory breast cancer and innovative radiotherapy approaches to intensify treatment in that setting. She led the national IDEA trial to investigate approaches for radiation treatment de-escalation among patients with biologically favorable breast cancer, and she is active in the National Cancer Institute's cooperative groups, including SWOG and NRG. She also serves on the NCI's BOLD task force on locoregional management of breast cancer. She is on the Steering Committee of the Early Breast Cancer Trialists Collaborative Group.

A substantial focus of her research considers issues of bioethics and gender equity in academic medicine. Her investigations of women's under-representation in senior positions in academic medicine and the mechanisms that must be targeted to promote equity have been funded by NIH R01 grants and grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, American Medical Association, and other philanthropic funders. She leads the national program evaluation for the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation's Fund to Retain Clinician Scientists, a large national intervention that was inspired in part by her own research. She also led an NIH R01-funded investigation using deliberative democratic approaches to illuminate patients' attitudes towards secondary use of data collected in routine clinical encounters and a Greenwall Foundation-funded investigation of patient attitudes towards approaches used by hospitals to encourage donations from grateful patients. She is the principal investigator of the NIH R01-funded EMPOWER trial that she developed in collaboration with the Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine Program.

Dr. Jagsi is the author of more than 400 articles in peer-reviewed journals, including multiple high-impact studies in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet and JAMA.

In recognition of her contributions, Dr. Jagsi has been recognized with the Leadership Award of the AAMC's Group on Women in Medicine and Science, LEAD Oncology's Woman of the Year Award, the American Medical Women's Association Woman in Science Award, the American Medical Students Association Women Leaders Award, and ASTRO's inaugural Mentorship Award.