Dr. Sharad Ghamande, executive vice chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University, has been named department chair.

Ghamande, who also is chief of the department’s Section of Gynecologic Oncology and associate director for clinical research and trials at the Georgia Cancer Center, begins his new job as chair Nov. 1.

“Over his nearly 20 years of service to MCG, Dr. Ghamande has demonstrated leadership in making MCG and the Georgia Cancer Center a destination treatment facility for women battling  gynecological cancers,” says Dr. David Hess, MCG Dean. “He has helped bring numerous clinical trials to campus, many for women who have failed standard therapies. He is a fantastic physician, investigator and educator and perhaps most importantly, a true patient advocate who serves in community support organizations and works to make sure every patient has knowledge of and access to the best possible treatments for their disease.”

Ghamande is the principal investigator for the Georgia Cancer Center’s five-year grant from the National Cancer Institute to lead the state’s only cancer research program focused on better access to clinical trials and cancer treatments for minority and underserved patients. The NCI Community Oncology Research Program — Minority Underserved Sites (NCORP-MU) program helps physicians at the cancer center partner with other institutions around the state to increase awareness of, and participation in, NCI-sponsored clinical trials and cancer care delivery research, particularly among minority and underserved populations.

As the only site of its kind in Georgia, and one of just 12 selected nationally, the Georgia Cancer Center–led consortium contributes to the design, conduct and translation of the national NCORP research agenda. The consortium, along with community partners, also helps set priorities for community-based cancer research and works to address the historic barriers to minority and underserved patients participating in clinical trials and other important cancer research.

Ghamande, along with Dr. Bunja Rungruang, associate professor in the Section of Gynecologic Oncology, helped establish the state’s first gynecologic oncology fellowship program in 2017 to train the next generation of physicians who will diagnose and treat the cancers that affect 91,000 and kill 30,000 women each year in the United States alone.

He is a member of the NCI’s Disparity Working Group of Clinical Trials, the NCORP representative on the NCI National Committee for Improving Clinical Trials Accrual and Georgia’s legislation action representative for the Society for Gynecologic Oncology (SGO). He is a member of the Phase I and Cervix Committees for the NCI’s NRG Group. He has been consistently named among America’s Top Doctors for Cancer and Best Doctors in America.

Ghamande is a board member of the Georgia Society of Clinical Oncologists (GASCO) and the Georgia Center for Oncology Research and Education (CORE).

Active in the community, he is the founder and president of the CSRA Gynecological Cancer Support Group and serves on the board of the Lydia Project for Women, which provides free support services to women anywhere facing any type of cancer.

He earned his medical degree from India’s Bombay University and completed his obstetrics and gynecology residency at Boston Medical Center and Boston University and his gynecologic oncology fellowship at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York.