Dr. Janessa Laskin, Lung Cancer Expert, to Join OncTalk

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January 5, 2008 - 12:59 am email to a friend printer friendly view / write comments

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Dr. West

Among the changes with transitioning from OncTalk to the nonprofit GRACE, one of the key steps has been to move from being a community with one expert providing nearly all of the content and Q & A (at least most of the A’s to people’s Q’s) to being a broader collection of experts working together. That’s a big deal, and it’s been hard to do - I can’t expect most other people to have the same motivation to spend so much time on this. But with the nonprofit should come the opportunity for financial support that can provide some compensation for the time other people dedicate to the GRACE/OncTalk community. There will be a lag time before GRACE has sufficient funds for these experts, but in the meantime I’ve invited a few key people to join the discussion based on their dedication to the cancer community. This hasn’t been mass mailings to anyone who would accept the offer — I’m carefully and rather slowly inviting a few colleagues in the lung cancer community to participate, and this includes people who I think can provide balance and judgment and potentially a meaningful commitment to this community. The group of people who contribute expert content will be known as — wait for it — the FACE (Faculty of Appointed Clinical Experts) of GRACE. Love it?

Dr. Laskin has been a friend of mine for many years, and she now works at the British Columbia Cancer Agency in Vancouver, BC (so now with a Canadian faculty member, we’re officially going global). Her bio is listed below, but the main thing you should know is that she’s definitely qualified as an expert, a respected member of the emerging lung cancer leadership, and that she’s a great person who can balance her knowledge with compassion and good clinical judgment. She also even trained as a classical guitarist (not a skill likely to help here, but still…).

I’ve invited Dr. Laskin to provide answers to questions on the Q & A forum, as well as to write some posts here. My vision of GRACE is to have several cancer topics led by a small group of 2-4 experts who work together to provide valuable new information in posts and answer questions. They/we won’t always have the same opinion, and in fact I think it will be helpful for members here to see where collegial experts can have distinct practice styles and differences of opinion without there being one right answer.

After I’ve been running this site virtually on my own for more than a year, it’s hard for Dr. Laskin to wade in, but I assured her that everyone here will be welcoming, that I don’t want OncTalk or GRACE to be about me. I’m very happy to have her participating and I hope the rest of you will to. OncTalk was meant to be scalable, and it’s time to bring in other experts, like Dr. Laskin, and Leah de Roulet, who I introduced earlier this week (post here).

Here’s her formal bio:

Dr. Janessa Laskin is a medical oncologist at the British Columbia Cancer Agency in Vancouver, BC. Her primary clinical and research focus is on lung cancer.

Dr Laskin received her undergraduate degree at McGill University in Montreal. Following this she returned home to B.C. and completed medical school and residency in internal medicine at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Dr Laskin stayed on in Vancouver to complete her medical oncology training and is certified as a specialist in both internal medicine and medical oncology by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada (as required to practice in Canada). After her medical oncology training Dr Laskin completed a one-year Thoracic Oncology Clinical Research Fellowship at Vanderbilt University Medical School in Nashville, TN under the mentorship of Drs Alan Sandler and David Johnson.

After her fellowship, she returned to Vancouver in 2003 and has been on staff at the BC Cancer Agency and as an Assistant Professor of Medicine for our affiliated UBC Department of Medicine. Dr Laskin

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