In June 2026, Dr. Julie Lang, an acclaimed translational research scientist and a clinical specialist in breast surgical oncology, officially joined the faculty of the University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center as medical director of the Breast Center and the Department of Surgery Division of Surgical Oncology as a professor and section chief of breast surgery.
Dr. Lang comes to Kentucky from her former position as professor of surgery with the Cleveland Clinic Breast Cancer Program. She served over five years as a specialist in breast surgery and cancer biology at the Cleveland Clinic Main Campus and Hillcrest Hospital with a simultaneous appointment as a clinical researcher with the Case-Cleveland Comprehensive Cancer Center where she specialized in cancer genomics and epigenomics.
She completed a general surgery residency and a two-year post-doctoral fellowship in breast cancer research at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in the early 2000s. She subsequently matched into the Breast Cancer Surgical Oncology Fellowship program at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.
Out of fellowship, Dr. Lang's first professional appointment was as director of breast surgical oncology at the University of Arizona Cancer Center and as a principal investigator within the University of Arizona's prestigious BIO5 Institute. Following five years of service in Tucson, Dr. Lang was recruited as Associate Professor of Surgery to the University of Southern California (USC). At the USC Norris Cancer Center she served as principal investigator of a lab that was funded for translational research projects on topics including liquid biopsy and inflammatory breast cancer. Three years later she was named director of the Breast Cancer Research Program, serving as a clinical trialist and bringing basic and clinical scientists together for collaboration.
Eight years later, she was recruited to a clinical leadership position at the Cleveland Clinic and, recently accepted an offer to share her clinical skills and leading research expertise to serve the patients and learners of the UK Chandler Medical Center and the Markey Cancer Center, Kentucky's NCI designated Comprehensive Cancer Center.
"We are proud to have Dr. Lang as the chief of breast surgery of the only program in Lexington with four fellowship trained breast surgeons," said Joseph Kim, M.D., division chief of surgical oncology.
As a researcher, Dr. Lang has published extensively on breast disease and breast cancer with over one hundred publications and has been an invited lecturer at national and international universities and professional conferences. Her Markey Cancer Center-affiliated laboratory will be in the Healthy Kentucky Research Building.
She has been a principal investigator (PI) or co-PI for dozens of private and public funded research grants including a grant from the Susan G. Komen Foundation and a U01 grant from the National Institutes of Health while at the University of Southern California. Her research on RNA sequencing of circulating tumor cells was used to support FDA approval of a technology to isolate cancer cells from blood for molecular profiling.