After a national search, Corey Speers, M.D., Ph.D., has been named chair of the UAB Department of Radiation Oncology, effective May 12, 2025.
Speers joins UAB from Case Western Reserve University and the University Hospitals Seidman Cancer Center in Cleveland, Ohio, where he is a professor, the vice chair of Research, and the Hennessy Hyland Master Clinician in Immunotherapy and New Drug Development in the Department of Radiation Oncology.
“I am both deeply honored and humbled to join the Department of Radiation Oncology at UAB, a department with such a remarkable legacy of excellence in patient care, research, and education,” Speers said. “I am excited to work alongside the talented faculty, staff, and trainees to build upon this strong foundation and further advance our shared mission of innovation and impact. I am immensely grateful for this opportunity and look forward to contributing to the continued success of this exceptional team.”
Speers is an internationally renowned expert on the management of breast cancer, with a focus on the most aggressive forms of the disease. His research interests include nomination and validation of expression-based signatures to predict patients that need treatment intensification and signatures to identify patients who will not need further adjuvant therapy for breast cancer. His translational work has credentialed a number of novel targets for the treatment of triple-negative breast cancer. His laboratory focuses on “bench to bedside” research that includes basic mechanistic studies, translational preclinical studies, and clinical research that is funded by the NIH, NCI, DOD, BCRF, Komen for the Cure Foundation, and the Hope Foundation. As principal investigator or co-investigator, Speers works to identify more effective, targeted therapies for breast cancer, including PARP-inhibitors, CDK4/6 inhibitors, and androgen receptor antagonists as agents for radiosensitization. His lab has also utilized kinome screens to identify novel targets for the treatment of aggressive breast cancers like triple-negative breast cancer.
Speers joined the University of Michigan Ann Arbor and the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System in 2015 as an assistant professor in Radiation Oncology and became an associate professor in 2021. He joined Case Western Reserve University and the University Hospitals Seidman Cancer Center as a professor in Radiation Oncology in 2022. He currently serves as director of the Phase I Clinical Trials program in the Department of Radiation Oncology, and as co-director of the Breast Oncology Program at the Seidman Cancer Center. He is also the co-founder of PFS Genomics, a molecular diagnostics company that was sold to Exact Sciences in 2021.
Speers is an active member of several professional societies and memberships including the American Association for Cancer Research, American Medical Association, American Society for Radiation Oncology, American Society of Clinical Oncology, and Radiological Society of North America. He has been an invited lecturer in dozens of countries including England, Scotland, Sweden, Korea, Thailand, and China as well as throughout the United States.
“Dr. Speers’ passion, energy, and dedication to scientific discovery, clinical excellence, and training and mentorship make him an ideal leader to carry forward the department’s high standards of excellence and propel it to new heights,” said Anupam Agarwal, M.D., senior vice president for Medicine and dean of the Heersink School of Medicine.
Speers earned his medical degree and Ph.D. from Baylor College of Medicine, and completed his Radiation Oncology residency at University of Michigan Hospital and Health System in Ann Arbor.