Laura J. Esserman


Laura Esserman is a surgeon and breast cancer oncology specialist. She is the director of the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine.
Esserman leads the I-SPY trials, Athena Breast Health Network and the WISDOM study.  Esserman is an inductee in the Giants of Cancer Care, 2018, for Cancer Diagnostics and the “less is more” approach.
Esserman performs live in the show “Audacity” which she co-created. She is also known as the “singing surgeon” for singing to her patients as they go under anesthesia.

Early life and education

Esserman attended college at Harvard University and completed medical school Stanford University. After finishing a postdoctoral fellowship in breast oncology at Stanford and earning a master's degree at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Esserman joined the faculty at UCSF Medical Center in 1993.

Work and research

Esserman is the director of the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center. She believes that some patients with a type of breast cancer, ductal carcinoma in situ, should be placed on active surveillance instead of undergoing a biopsy, mastectomy or lumpectomy. Dr. Esserman, is one of the most vocal proponents of the idea that breast cancer screening brings with it overdiagnosis and overtreatment.

Honors and awards

Esserman was named in TIME Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2016. She was a speaker at the first Time 100 Health Summit on October 17, 2019.
In 2019, she was awarded the Simon M. Shubitz Cancer Award and Lectureship from the University of Chicago for her significant contributions to the study of cancer.
She was honored by OncLive for Giants of Cancer Care, 2018, Cancer Diagnosis.