About Duke Surgery Research

Shelley Hwang, MD, MPH, is the Mary and Daryl Hart Distinguished Professor of Surgery in the School of Medicine. She has served as Vice Chair of Research in the Department of Surgery since 2015. 

Dr. Hwang began her academic surgical career at the University of California-San Francisco School of Medicine in 1998 until joining the Duke Division of Surgical Oncology in 2011. She holds a secondary faculty appointment of Professor in Radiology, and is a member of the Duke Cancer Institute as well as a core faculty member of the Duke-Margolis Institute for Public Health Policy. 

In 2016, Dr. Hwang was included in TIME magazine's "100 Most Influential People" as a pioneer in her field, an honor shared with Laura J. Esserman, MD, MBA, a fellow breast surgical oncologist at the University of California-San Francisco.

An avid scholar, Dr. Hwang has published nearly 300 academic articles, and an additional nearly 100 conference papers. Her research largely focuses on early-stage breast cancers, and in treatment of ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS). She is currently the principal investigator of the Comparing an Operation to Monitoring, with or without Endocrine Therapy (COMET) study, a large, national clinical trial funded by the Breast Cancer Research Foundation exploring whether “active monitoring” can be a safe and effective alternative to surgery for women with low-risk DCIS.

Jennifer Janes is the Administrative Director of Research for the Duke Department of Surgery. In this role, she provides strategic and operational leadership for the department's research enterprise, including clinical research administration, core facilities, faculty research support, and grant management. Since joining Duke Surgery in 2014, Jennifer founded the Substrate Services Core Research Support (SSCRS), a centralized platform designed to expand core biobanking access across the department and the Duke School of Medicine. She subsequently led the development of scalable infrastructure and integrated research support services that have helped position the department among the top NIH-funded surgery programs in the country.

Prior to her work at Duke, Jennifer served as the biorepository manager at the Emory University Transplant Center and was a research scientist at the University of Florida.

Jennifer earned her Bachelor of Science in Microbiology and Cell Science and her Master of Science in Veterinary Medical Sciences from the University of Florida. She also holds a Master of Business Administration from North Carolina State University. 

jennifer.janes@duke.edu

Lauren G. Anderson, PhD, has served as Director of Research Development for the Department of Surgery since 2017, after first joining the department as a Research Development Project Manager in 2015. Her primary function is providing strategic guidance for faculty and department leadership in the development of research proposals and managing complex projects. This includes fostering new research initiatives, development of team and individual grant proposals, and managing a team of proposal developers and project managers.

 Dr. Anderson came to Duke in 2010 as a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Neurology before transitioning into research development in 2013 in the Office of Research Development for the Duke University School of Medicine . She is an International Coaching Federation (ICF)-certified Professional Coach, holds a BA in Neuroscience from The Johns Hopkins University and a PhD in Neurobiology from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

lauren.g.anderson@duke.edu