Roger Anderson, PhD - reducing and eliminating social disparities in cancer incidence and outcomes

Roger Anderson, PhD
Transcript:
I'm passionate about discovering ways to improve how we access cancer prevention, treatment and services in the population so that we can be more effective in reducing cancer disparities and burden. What I love about my research is the creative pursuit of solving these needs. By leveraging health care system and community-level resources.
I'm Roger Anderson, and I'm a professor of public health sciences and associate director of the UVA Cancer Center as lead of the Population Sciences program. My research is dedicated on reducing and eliminating social disparities in cancer incidence and outcomes. A lot of my research has been focused on rural cancer disparities, especially in Appalachia, where we see high rates of incidence and mortality from breast cancer, colorectal cancer, cervical cancer, and lung cancer.
Some of my work is involved in improving access to evidence-based interventions such as HPV vaccination, smoking cessation, cancer screening.
So the health impact of my research is really by preventing the leading cause of premature death and disability in the population, and that's from cancer. A second major impact is by intervening with communities where we can impact the lives of many individuals at once. I think the overall health impact of my research, though, is by eliminating preventable cancers, the ones that will never get to see in our clinics.