MED MOVES: Groundbreaking at Rutgers CINJ, New Cancer Center Director at LSU Health New Orleans/LCMC

From left, RWJ Barnabas Health's Barry Ostrowsky, Sheryl and Jack Morris, Rutgers CINJ Director Steven K. Libutti, MD, FACS

A Patient-Centered Cancer Facility. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy led a group of pollical, academic, and healthcare leaders in New Brunswick, N.J., Thursday to break ground on what will become the Jack and Sheryl Morris Cancer Center, a $750 million, 510,000 square-foot-structure that will be the new home of the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, the state’s only National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center. Built in partnership with RWJBarnabas Health and the New Brunswick Development Corporation, the facility is being designed with ease of patient access in mind, putting imaging and other diagnostic tests, treatment, follow-up, education, and survivorship care all in one location. The facility is adjacent to existing cancer center facilities and Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital. Located in the center of New Jersey, the healthcare complex is a few blocks from a stop on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. New Brunswick Mayor Jim Cahill told a gathering of several hundred guests that the new facility will be able to accommodate an additional 20,000 cancer care visits each year when it is completed in 2024.

John Stewart, MD

New Orleans' New Cancer Leader. John Stewart, MD, has been named to a key cancer leadership role in the Southeast, as health system leaders of Louisiana State University Health New Orleans/Louisiana Children’s Medical Center named him to lead the Cancer Center on June 9. Stewart will also serve as a professor of surgery for the LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine. He is a board-certified surgical oncologist who previously was a University of Illinois presidential scholar and professor of surgery in the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Chicago, where he served as deputy director of the University of Illinois Cancer Center, and physician executive for oncology sciences at the University of Illinois Health. Louisiana has the fifth-highest cancer mortality rate in the country, and rates are especially high among men. Historically high levels of poverty and environmental hazards contribute to elevated cancer rates, but Louisiana has implemented Medicaid expansion to bring cancer screening to larger numbers of residents.