Samuel Hellman

I am Samuel Hellman, the A. N. Pritzker Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago. My major career positions included 15 years as a Professor of Radiation Oncology at Harvard Medical School where I was the first chairperson of that newly formed department. I left to become the Physician-in-Chief of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City following which, I became the Dean of the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago and concomitantly the Dean of the Biological Sciences Division of the university. After my tenure as Dean, I remained as a senior member of the medical school faculty.

I have co-edited with Vincent DeVita and Steven Rosenberg the leading textbook of oncology, Cancer: Principles and Practice of Oncology, through its first seven editions. It was by far the most successful of its kind, sold in excess of 40,000 copies of a number of the English editions and some editions were also translated into Spanish, Chinese or Italian. With DeVita and Rosenberg, I edited four editions of the textbook AIDS, and with others I co-edited five sequential textbooks concerning breast cancer. I was an early proponent and remain an advocate of breast preserving treatment as the preferred treatment of small breast cancers. I have written two books intended for the general public as well as for a medical audience: Learning While Caring in 2017 and Repairing and Perfecting the World in 2021.