Nita Ahuja

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Nita Ahuja is a surgeon and the Chair of the Department of Surgery at Yale School of Medicine and Surgeon-in-Chief of Surgery at Yale New Haven Hospital. She is Yale’s first woman to hold the Chair of Surgery in more than 200 years.

Before Yale, she was the first woman to serve as Chief of Surgical Oncology at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

Her research focuses on epigenetics in cancer. She runs a laboratory that studies how epigenetic changes affect cancers of the digestive system, like colorectal and pancreatic cancers, and works to translate those findings into biomarkers and new epigenetic therapies. She has led more than twenty national and international clinical trials in gastrointestinal and breast cancers.

Ahuja’s early work helped identify the CpG island methylator phenotype (CIMP) in colorectal cancer, a concept now linked to prognosis and therapy response and found in several other tumor types. Her team has also developed biomarkers for early detection of colorectal and pancreatic cancers using non-invasive blood samples, with some being developed into commercial tests. She has led epigenetic therapy trials in solid tumors through the Stand Up To Cancer consortium since 2008.

She has received multiple honors, including the Abell Foundation Award in 2014 from Johns Hopkins Alliance for Science and Technology Development, and her research has been cited more than 11,000 times.

Ahuja is also active in scholarship and policy related to surgeon-scientists, co-authoring a 2016 report on barriers to basic science for surgeons and contributing to publications on soft tissue sarcomas.

Born in India, she moved to the United States with her parents at age eight and began her scientific career as a laboratory technician in the Immunology Department at the NIH. She studied medicine at Duke University and completed surgery training at Johns Hopkins, joining Hopkins’s faculty in 2003.

In February 2025, she was announced as the next Dean of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, a role she will begin on May 15, 2025.