Office of Primary Care and Area Health Education Centers (AHEC) Program

Retired oncology professor Jerome Yates, M.D., with a poster for his Cancer History Project podcast episode

(JULY 29, 2022) Retired oncology professor Jerome Yates, M.D., spoke with Alexandria Carolan, a reporter with The Cancer Letter and associate editor of the Cancer History Project, about building a cancer center at the University of Vermont.

Yates started at UVM in 1974 with the goal of building a cancer center. At the time, he was the only medical oncologist in the state. The 1970s was a good time to start a cancer center in Vermont, he recalled. “We really had an extremely strong program in the late ’70s. And in fact, it was probably as strong as some of the programs that were in the major cancer centers, fortuitously, because the science was there, and the opportunity to develop a training program in medical oncology and to expand the medical oncology expertise, locally, was really rich at that time,” he said.