2024 Richard Smith, MD Symposium on Cancer Care featuring Suleika Jaouad
Join us for this special online event as we welcome Suleika Jaouad as the next Richard Smith Symposium Speaker on Cancer Care on Monday, June 3, 2024, from 6-7 p.m.
An Emmy Award-winning journalist and celebrated TED speaker, Suleika Jaouad (pictured right) is the author of the instant New York Times bestselling memoir Between Two Kingdoms, which recounts her odyssey of healing and self-discovery after a diagnosis of leukemia at the age of twenty-two and given only a 35% chance of survival.
“When I found myself in my own aftermath of a life interruption, I was intent on moving on. I wanted to leave all that behind me. I wanted to seize this new opportunity of living that I’d been granted. But I very quickly realized that you don’t get to move on from your most difficult passages. You have to learn how to move forward with them.” —Suleika Jaouad
The Richard Smith Symposium on Cancer Care began as a generous gift from the Smith Family to carry on Dr. Smith’s commitment to quality and safety in the care of patients. This event is a unique opportunity to connect with a remarkable individual and gain valuable perspective. Mark your calendar and reserve your spot today!
View last year's symposium featuring Azra Raza, MD here:
About Dr. Raza
Dr. Raza is a Professor of Medicine and Director of the MDS Center at Columbia University in New York, NY. She started her research in Myelodysplastic Syndromes (MDS) in 1982 and moved to Rush University, Chicago, Illinois in 1992, where she was the Charles Arthur Weaver Professor in Oncology and Director, Division of Myeloid Diseases. The MDS Program, along with a Tissue Repository containing more than 50,000 samples from MDS and acute leukemia patients was successfully relocated to the University of Massachusetts in 2004 and to Columbia University in 2010.
She has published the results of her laboratory research and clinical trials in prestigious, peer reviewed journals such as The New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, Blood, Cancer, Cancer Research, British Journal of Hematology, Leukemia, and Leukemia Research. Dr. Raza serves on numerous national and international panels as a reviewer, consultant and advisor and is the recipient of several awards.
In 2019, Dr. Raza published The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Care to the Last. “[She] offers a searing account of how both medicine and our society (mis)treats cancer, how we can do better, and why we must. A lyrical journey from hope to despair and back again, The First Cell explores cancer from every angle: medical, scientific, cultural, and personal. Indeed, Raza describes how she bore the terrible burden of being her own husband's oncologist as he succumbed to leukemia. Like When Breath Becomes Air, The First Cell is no ordinary book of medicine, but a book of wisdom and grace by an author who has devoted her life to making the unbearable easier to bear.”