The UAB Department of Surgery will welcome Ashley Holder, M.D., FACS, on June 1, 2020, to the Division of Surgical Oncology.

Before joining the faculty at UAB, Holder was an assistant professor of surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College and Houston Methodist Hospital, where she launched the institution’s first neoadjuvant immunotherapy trial for patients with melanoma and served as co-chair of the cancer center’s Melanoma and Sarcoma Disease-Oriented Group.  She also served as adjunct assistant professor of surgery at Texas A&M University College of Medicine.

“I am delighted to be a member of such an all-star team of faculty, and I look forward to supporting the UAB Department of Surgery and the Division of Surgical Oncology in research, patient care and academics,” said Holder.

Holder received her medical degree from Baylor College of Medicine, where she completed an HHMI Medical Student Research Fellowship, and completed her general surgery residency at Washington University in St. Louis, where she served as one of two Walter F. Ballinger administrative chief residents and was a finalist for the ACS Jameson L. Chassin, M.D., FACS Award for Professionalism. She completed her fellowship in Complex General Surgical Oncology at UT MD Anderson Cancer Center and was awarded the Daniel Benedict Gazan Fellowship in Sarcoma Research.

Through her secondary appointment in the Department of Nanomedicine at the Houston Methodist Research Institute, she was awarded a High-Impact High-Risk Grant Award by the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas to investigate a novel nanoparticle platform to enhance the effect of chemotherapy and subsequently received an internal grant to transition this platform from the bench to Phase I clinical trials.

Holder’s research interest is investigating the transport of immune cells and metastatic melanoma between primary tumors and lymph nodes to develop innovative prognostic tools and therapeutics.

Holder is an active member of several professional societies, including the Association for Academic Surgery, the American College of Surgeons, and the Society of Surgical Oncology, among others. She also serves on the editorial boards of Frontiers in Oncology: Skin Cancer Section and ACS Case Reviews in Surgery.