Jeff Michalski was elected president-elect of the American Society for Radiation Oncology.
ASTRO members also elected Catheryn Yashar as health policy council vice chair and John Buatti as science council vice chair. The officers will begin their terms in October during ASTRO’s annual meeting in Chicago.
Michalski, the Carlos Perez Distinguished Professor and vice chair of radiation oncology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, will serve a one-year term as president-elect, followed by single-year terms as president, chair and immediate past chair of the ASTRO board. Yashar and Buatti will serve two-year terms as vice-chairs, followed by two-year terms as chairs of their respective councils.
In his tenure as president-elect and eventual chair of ASTRO, Michalski plans to focus on the society’s priority issues including safeguarding equitable patient access to life-saving cancer treatment; building a pipeline of diverse radiation oncology clinicians and researchers; and developing programs and policies that will prepare the future workforce to meet the evolving cancer care landscape.
An expert in genitourinary cancers, pediatric cancers and cancer survivorship care, Michalski has experience leading and supporting clinical trials and developing clinical guidelines with ASTRO and NCI. He also co-chairs the radiation oncology section of the NRG Oncology national clinical trials group.
Additionally, Catheryn Yashar (Health Policy Council vice chair) is a professor of radiation oncology at the University of California, San Diego, and the current chair of ASTRO’s Health Policy Committee.
An expert in gynecologic oncology, Yashar is the senior editor of gynecology for Practical Radiation Oncology and vice chair of the cervical/uterine panel for the National Comprehensive Cancer Network. In her board role, Yashar will work with policy stakeholders including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on key health policy issues, such as establishing an alternative payment model for radiation oncology that will protect patient access to value-based, guideline-concordant cancer care; reducing the burden of prior authorization hurdles that can unnecessarily delay cancer treatment; and reversing excessive payment cuts that undermine access to care and disproportionately impact rural and community-based practices.
John Buatti (Science Council vice chair) is the founding chair and a professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of Iowa’s Carver College of Medicine, where he also holds secondary faculty appointments in neurosurgery and otolaryngology.
Buatti is a scholar and an expert on the treatment of cranial malignancies, as well as efforts to improve the quality of cancer imaging in therapy. He previously served on ASTRO’s Science Council Steering Committee and currently chairs the ASTRO task force on radiopharmaceuticals—an emerging approach of combining radiation particles to targeted therapies, such as the use of radiation drugs to both find and treat tumors—and he recently led the development of ASTRO’s framework for patient-centered care in radiopharmaceutical therapy.
In his role, Buatti will continue to support innovations in radiation biology, medical physics and clinical research that advance modern and multidisciplinary cancer care.
The ASTRO membership also elected three new members to the Society’s Nominating Committee. Helen Shih, of Massachusetts General Hospital, Join Y. Luh, of St. Joseph Hospital, and Kristy Brock, of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, will serve three-year terms beginning in October.
