Physician Robert Mayer will be the speaker for this year's Samuel O. Thier-Robert Mayer Lectureship in Health Policy. His topic will be "Screening for Colorectal Cancer: It REALLY Works!"

Robert Mayer

The lecture is free and open to the public.

President Sorensen and his wife, Donna, endowed the lectureship, which began last year. Mayer is a professor of medicine in the Harvard University Medical School and a director at the Center for Gastrointestinal Malignancies at the Dana-Farber Canter Institute (DFCI) in Boston. He oversaw the cancer treatments for Mrs. Sorensen's brother, Ronald Ingemie, who lost his battle with cancer last spring.

Mayer received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1969 and postgraduate training in internal medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. After fellowships in hematology and oncology at the National Cancer Institute and DFCI, he joined DFCI in 1976.

In 1997, Mayer was president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. He currently serves as vice chair for academic affairs in DFCI's Department of Medical Oncology, director of Dana-Farber/Partners CancerCare's Hematology/Oncology Fellowship Program, and director of DFCI's Center for Gastrointestinal Oncology.

Gastrointestinal cancer ranks second only to respiratory cancer in the number of new cases and annual deaths in the United States each year.

For more information, call 7-5458 or 7-3235.

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