Dr. Nita Ahuja, recently appointed as the William H. Carmalt Professor of Surgery, is a surgeon and research scientist internationally renowned for her expertise in the management of peritoneal cancer metastases with cytoreduction and heated intraperitoneal chemotherapy.
Since February, Ahuja has served as chair of the Department of Surgery at Yale School of Medicine and chief of surgery at Yale New Haven Hospital. Her surgical specialization is in gastrointestinal cancers, including gastric, rectal, and pancreatic cancers. She is widely recognized as a leader in translational epigenetics, conducting investigator-initiated clinical trials in colorectal cancer, pancreatic cancer, and other solid tumors. In addition, she has developed biomarkers for early detection of colorectal and pancreatic cancers.
Ahuja obtained her medical education at the Duke University School of Medicine and her training in general surgery at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She completed a fellowship in surgical oncology at Johns Hopkins focused on hepatobiliary malignancies and joined the Hopkins’ faculty in 2003. Prior to her Yale appointment in February, she served as the Jacob C. Handelsman Professor in Abdominal Surgery and professor of surgery, oncology, and urology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She was also chief of surgical oncology at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
The Yale professor serves on multiple editorial boards and in national leadership positions, including serving as a member of the American Surgical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges Council of Faculty and Academic Societies Administrative Board, and as the elected national representative to the Commission on Cancer from the Fellowship for the American College of Surgeons. She has published over 200 papers and book chapters contributing to both the surgical and basic science fields. Her awards and honors include the William J. Reinhoff Jr. Scholar Award, the American Surgical Association Fellowship, the Society of Surgical Oncology Clinical Investigator Award, and the Abell Foundation Award: Johns Hopkins Alliance for Science and Technology Development.
