Today, the Senior Vice Chancellor for the Health Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh, Anantha Shekhar, MD, PhD, shared the news that Jeremy Rich, MD, MHS, MBA, interim director at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center, has accepted a new role outside of Pitt and UPMC. Since 2020, Dr. Rich has served as the Pittsburgh Foundation Professor of Personalized Cancer Therapy and professor of neurology at Pitt, and as deputy director of research at UPMC Hillman.
Effective Jan. 15, the UPMC Hillman roles of interim director and interim deputy director will be assumed respectively by Kathryn Schmitz, PhD, MPH, professor of medicine in UPSOM’s Division of Hematology/Oncology, and José P. Zevallos, MD, MPH, chair of otolaryngology at UPMC and the Dr. Eugene N. Myers Professor and chair of the Department of Otolaryngology at UPSOM.
Dr. Schmitz currently serves UPMC Hillman as associate director of population sciences and founding director of the UPMC Moving Through Cancer Program. Consistently funded by the National Cancer Institute since 2001, she is an international thought leader in the field of exercise oncology. She has won numerous awards, including being the first oncology researcher to receive the President’s Council on Fitness Lifetime Achievement Award. Overall, she has more than 350 publications, with a Google Scholar h-index of 91. Dr. Schmitz earned her PhD and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in epidemiology at the University of Minnesota. She joined Pitt in 2022, directly from Penn State College of Medicine, where she served as Distinguished Professor of Public Health Sciences. Prior to that, she served as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
Dr. Zevallos became chair of the Department of Otolaryngology in August 2022. He was previously head and neck surgery division chief and the Joseph B. Kimbrough Professor of Head and Neck Surgery at Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis. Dr. Zevallos’ clinical interests include the management of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma, salivary gland tumors, thyroid and parathyroid conditions, and benign tumors of the head and neck. He is an accomplished researcher and highly sought-after speaker nationally and internationally in these fields. Dr. Zevallos is also the founder and chair of the board of a molecular diagnostics start-up company, Droplet Biosciences, based in Cambridge, Mass.
Please join us in thanking Dr. Rich for his four years of leadership, and in wishing him, and Drs. Schmitz and Zevallos well in their new roles!
