Rebecca Shatsky MD

Dr. Rebecca A. Shatsky, MD, serves as the breast medical oncology team leader at the UC San Diego Health Moores Cancer Center. She is also the director of the breast cancer clinical trials program and the inflammatory and triple-negative breast cancer program. Dr. Shatsky has expertise in treating all breast cancer subtypes, with a particular clinical and translational interest in the treatment of young women with breast cancer, lobular breast cancer, triple-negative breast cancer, metaplastic breast and breast cancer with brain metastases or leptomeningeal disease. She also created and leads a very active young breast cancer survivor group at UC San Diego.

Dr. Shatsky uses numerous forms of therapy to treat her patients with breast cancer, including endocrine therapy, chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and molecularly matched targeted therapy. In metastatic breast cancer, she is known for her expertise in the interpretation and use of multi-omics to guide therapy choices.

As a professor of medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine, she is involved in translational research that focuses on the treatment of triple-negative and lobular breast cancer and is funded by multiple sources, including grants from the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine, CureBound, and the Alpha clinic. Her work has been published in Nature Medicine, The Journal of Clinical Oncology, JAMA Oncology, Breast Cancer Research, and Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, among others.

Dr. Shatsky serves as the national co-chair of clinical trial operations for the I-SPY2 trial and is a scientific advisory board member for the International Lobular Breast Cancer Alliance. She is a current member of the American Society of Clinical Oncology's Metastatic Breast Cancer guideline panel and the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) guideline panel for screening and diagnosis of breast cancer.

She completed a breast cancer-focused clinical and research fellowship in hematology/oncology at UC San Diego School of Medicine and a residency in internal medicine at UC Los Angeles David Geffen School of Medicine. Dr. Shatsky earned her medical degree from the University of Southern California (USC) Keck School of Medicine. She completed her undergraduate studies at Cornell University. Dr. Shatsky is board-certified in internal medicine, hematology, and medical oncology.