James Ford MD, FASCO

Dr. Ford is a medical oncologist and geneticist at Stanford, devoted to studying the genetic basis of breast and GI cancer development, treatment, and prevention. Dr. Ford graduated in 1984 Magna Cum Laude (Biology) from Yale University where he later received his M.D. degree from the School of Medicine in 1989. He was an internal medicine resident (1989-91), a Clinical Fellow in Medical Oncology (1991-94), a Research Fellow of Biological Sciences (1993-97) at Stanford, and joined the faculty in 1998. He is currently a Professor of Medicine (Oncology) and Genetics, and Director of the Stanford Cancer Genetics Clinic and the Cancer Genomics Program at the Stanford University Medical Center.

Dr. Ford’s research goals are to understand the role of genetic changes in cancer genes in the risk and development of common cancers. He studies the role of the p53 and BRCA1 tumor suppressor genes in DNA repair and uses techniques for high-throughput genomic analyses of cancer to identify molecular signatures for targeted therapies. Dr. Ford’s clinical interests include the diagnosis and treatment of patients with a hereditary predisposition to cancer. He runs the Stanford Cancer Genetics Clinic, that sees patients for genetic counseling and testing of hereditary cancer syndromes for prevention and early diagnosis of cancer in high-risk individuals and populations. He has recently been named the Director of Stanford’s new Cancer Genomics Program, performing next-generation tumor profiling to identify novel genetic targets for personalized targeted therapies, and directs the Molecular Tumor Board. Dr. Ford is an editor of numerous scientific journals, including Cancer Research, DNA Repair, and PLoS Genetics. He has recently been named the founding Editor-in-Chief of JCO Precision Oncology.