Linda T. Vahdat, M.D., MBA is the Chief of Cancer Services and Head of the Department of Hematology/ Oncology at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) – Norwalk Hospital Partnership. She is a Member of the Breast Medicine Service at MSK and a Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City.
Dr. Vahdat earned her undergraduate degree from Barnard College/Columbia University in New York City and completed her medical degree at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She remained at Mount Sinai for her residency training in Internal Medicine, after which she completed fellowship training in Medical Oncology and Hematology at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC). In 2014, she completed a master’s degree in Business Administration at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She found it a perfect complement to her research activities, as the program focused on management, operations, entrepreneurship, and data analytics.
Although Dr. Vahdat is a translational breast cancer medical oncologist by training, her expertise is in drug development. She has been involved in the identification, conceptualization, design, and conduct of Phase 0 through III clinical trials of new therapies in high-risk adjuvant and metastatic breast cancer patients since 1994.
Dr. Vahdat has led two separate drug-development efforts that led to FDA approval of two drugs active in metastatic breast cancer, and her team has taken the lead for at least two other drugs that have a high probability of success, both in triple-negative breast cancer.
She founded the Triple Negative Breast Cancer Clinic, the second in the U.S., in 2014.
Other significant research interests include elucidation of the process of metastases and side effects of therapy such as chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy. Dr. Vahdat is motivated to integrate new technology into translational medicine and has a number of collaborations (both at Cornell Bio-engineering and at MIT) that she hopes will change how we view and treat cancer. She has also been actively involved with and has held several leadership positions in the American Society of Clinical Oncology, including Co-Chair of the ASCO Breast Cancer Symposium. Dr. Vahdat was also on the Executive Board of Cancer Care from 2006 until 2012.