Leonard S. Marks MD

Leonard S. Marks, MD, is Professor and inaugural holder of the detention Chair in Urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. He graduated from the University of Texas Medical Branch, where he received his MD with AOA honors and his MA in Physiology in 1969. He served an internship and surgical residency at UCLA/Harbor General Hospital. For the following two years, he served on active duty as Lieutenant Commander in the US Public Health Service. He was named a Post-Doctoral Research Scholar at UCLA School of Medicine in 1973-4. He completed his Urology Residency at UCLA and was a Lecturer in Urology there in 1978, following which he entered private practice in Los Angeles. He re-joined the UCLA faculty full-time in 2009. While in practice, Dr. Marks founded a non-profit research organization, the Urological Sciences Research Foundation, a 501c3 corporation, to further his academic interests. He became an original AFUD scholar in 1992 for work relating serum PSA levels to prostate histology. He received a Prostate Cancer Foundation (PCF) research award in 2000 for cross-cultural studies of prostate cancer. As an early advocate of multimedia in medical education, he served as Website Editor of Urology for The Gold Journal from 1998-2010. For his work in the scientific evaluation of alternative medicines, he was appointed to committees of the American Urological Association, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Academy of Sciences. Over the past decade, he has been Principal Investigator of three separate R01 Awards from the National Cancer Institute devoted to targeted prostate biopsy and focal therapy of prostate cancer. He has authored more than 150 scientific publications.