About David Jablons
Meet Dr. David M. Jablons, a highly accomplished thoracic and cardiac surgeon, Professor, and Chief of the Section of General Thoracic Surgery at UCSF, and Program Leader of Thoracic Oncology. Dr. Jablons is also the Ada Distinguished Professor in Thoracic Oncology and Nan T. McEvoy Distinguished Professor of Thoracic Surgical Oncology.
Dr. Jablons is also the Director of the Thoracic Oncology Lab, one of the largest in the Department of Surgery, which has a significant portfolio of NIH grants and state-of-the-art equipment. Utilizing next-generation sequencing and leveraging one of the largest thoracic tissue banks in the world, the lab has compiled an enviable record of scientific discovery and invention, including a life-saving prognostic assay that informs the decision for providing adjuvant therapy to early-stage lung cancer patients.
He received his medical degree from Albany Medical College and completed his general surgery residency at Tufts-New England Medical Center and his thoracic surgery residency at what is now New York Presbyterian-Weill Cornell Medical Center. He served as a Navy commander while Chief of Thoracic Surgery at the Oakland Naval Hospital. In 1997, he was named Chief of General Thoracic Surgery at UCSF.
Dr. Jablons is a widely sought-after surgeon, and one patient, Bonnie J. Addario, after recovering from an arduous lung cancer surgery, started a foundation bearing her name that she co-founded with Dr. Jablons. Today, the Addario Foundation is one of the leading underwriters of lung cancer research. Dr. Jablons is also a dedicated teacher and outstanding mentor for both clinical fellows and surgical residents, the latter including Dan Raz and Johannes Kratz, protégés with an enviable and prolific record of publications.
He has been a trailblazer in educational outreach, co-founding the UCSF Thoracic Oncology Conference, an annual symposium that provided expert training for thousands of community surgeons for over a decade. He also was instrumental in establishing the China Clinical Trials Consortium to find more effective treatments for lung cancer, and to ameliorate the epidemic of lung cancer in China. In 2009, he led the effort to bring World Conference on Lung Cancer to San Francisco, the preeminent event in the field, in which he served as co-Chair.
Dr. Jablons is a member of numerous professional organizations, including the Society of Thoracic Surgeons, the American College of Chest Physicians, the American Association for Cancer Research, and the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC). He is highly respected by his peers and has been recognized as one of the top 1% of physicians in the nation for thoracic surgery by U.S. News, and has been inducted into the American Surgical Society, the nation's most prestigious surgical society.