Keynote Speaker

C.. Richard Boland, MD, AGAF

C. Richard (Rick) Boland, MD, AGAF, is a gastroenterologist and Professor of Medicine at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine. He is from upstate New York, USA, received a BA from The University of Notre Dame and an MD from Yale Medical School. He has a career-long research interest in colon cancer, specifically focusing on the genetic causes of colon cancer and familial cancer syndromes.

Dr. Boland started studying familial colorectal cancer as a medical student, where he proposed a novel familial form of the disease in his MD thesis. His initial research was with Young S. Kim, MD, at UCSF, studying glycoprotein biochemistry in colorectal cancer. In 1990, at the U of Michigan, he turned his focus to the molecular genetics of colorectal cancer in a sabbatical in the HHMI with the geneticist Andrew Feinberg, MD, and resumed work on the hereditary form of colorectal cancer, which he had named “Lynch Syndrome” in 1984. He was among the first gastroenterologists to explore microsatellite instability (MSI) in cancer, and his laboratory developed the first in vitro models to study the basic biology of MSI and Lynch Syndrome. In recent years, he has contributed to our understanding of the genetic and epigenetic basis of colorectal cancer.

Dr. Boland has been an active clinician, teacher, and mentor. Several former mentees have had spectacular careers. John Carethers started his career with Rick, and followed him from Michigan to UCSD, where he was Division Chief, then Chairman of Medicine back at UM, and currently, he is Vice Chancellor for the Medical School at UCSD. Mary Hawn was with Rick at UM and is now Chair of Surgery at Stanford. Five trainees have held endowed chairs. Rick has been funded continuously by NIH since 1979, has served on multiple NIH (and other) Study Sections and was the chair of the Clinical Integrative Molecular Gastroenterology Study Section from 2014 to 2016, and was on the Multisociety Task for on Colorectal Cancer from 2012-18. He has published over 430 papers, has an H-Index of 111, and has written authoritative chapters for several textbooks of Internal Medicine, Gastroenterology and Genetics. He was elected into the Association of American Physicians in 2001. He was honored by the Collaborative Group of the Americas on Inherited Gastrointestinal Cancer (CGA-IGC) with their Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015, was president of the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) from 2011-2012. He was given the AGA Oncology Section Distinguished Mentor Award, the AGA Beaumont Prize for his research in 2015, and the AGA Friedenwald Medal in 2016. Dr. Boland has mentored 101 fellows and students in the laboratory, several of whom have become Division Chiefs (6 from the US alone) and Department Chairs as mentioned, and directly mentored 3 PhD students while at Baylor in Dallas, two of whom are women. He is also active in several mentoring programs at this time, including the AGA Forward Program and the student mentoring PULSE program.