Jay K. Harness, MD, FACS is the Chief Medical Officer at Maple Tree Cancer Alliance. He is an emeritus breast surgeon at both St. Joseph Hospital in Orange, CA and Northern Inyo Hospital in Bishop, CA. He is a recent Clinical Professor of Surgery at the University of California, Irvine. He spent 28 years of his career in full-time academic positions.

Dr. Harness received both his MD degree and training in general surgery at the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor. He then remained on the faculty at Michigan and developed one of the first United States academic multidisciplinary breast cancer centers in 1985. Dr. Harness left the University of Michigan in 1989 and spent two years at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston where he also established a multidisciplinary breast cancer center at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center. Subsequently, he came to Oakland, California in 1991 to join the University of California-East Bay Department of Surgery where he was a Professor and Chief of Surgical Oncology at Highland General Hospital. The opportunity to develop his third multidisciplinary breast cancer program at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange, CA came in the summer of 2003. He started his fourth multidisciplinary breast cancer program at Northern Inyo Hospital in Bishop, CA in 2016.

Over the years, Dr. Harness has been known for his work in the fields of endocrine and breast surgery, as well as the use of ultrasound in surgical practice. He is a member of several national and international surgical societies and associations. He is a Past- President of: The American Society of Breast Surgeons (ASBrS), the American Association of Endocrine Surgeons (AAES) and Breast Surgery International (BSI). He has authored over 100 scientific articles and book chapters and has been the lead editor of 3 textbooks. The Breast Cancer Answers Book, and Operative Approaches to Nipple-Sparing Mastectomy: Indications, Techniques, & Outcomes are his most recent books. He is a co-founder and Medical Director of Breast Cancer Answers, which is a Social Media video site for breast cancer patients, family members and friends. (www.breastcanceranswers.com) He is also the founder of Cancer Fitness, which is an educational website about the nature and value of Exercise Oncology Programs. (https://cancerfitness.org/)

His current focus is making “Exercise Oncology” a standard of adjunctive care for cancer patients nationally and internationally.

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