James B. Yu, MD, MHS

James Yu, MD, MHS, is the Medical Director of Smilow Cancer Hospital Radiation Oncology. A radiation oncologist, Dr. Yu specializes in treating genitourinary cancers such as kidney, bladder and prostate, central nervous system cancers and cases requiring Gamma Knife stereotactic radiosurgery.

“We treat our patients with state-of-the-art, evidence-based care that takes into account not just their medical condition, but their values and goals,” he says. “Using advanced technology, such as the Leksell Gamma Knife® Icon™, we can protect as much of the patient’s brain as possible. This maximizes our patients’ ability to think and function. I tell patients that our treatments try to keep ‘you being you’ for as long as possible.”

A Professor of Therapeutic Radiology at Yale School of Medicine, Dr. Yu also conducts research on ways to use radiotherapy treatments to improve outcomes for cancer patients. “We need to push the field ever forward and not be satisfied with merely prolonging survival,” says Dr. Yu. “I think radiosurgery will play a role in this. As systemic therapies improve and our ability to control microscopically disseminated disease improves, noninvasive ablative therapies will become ever more important.”

As a former Yale Center for Clinical Investigation scholar and member of the Cancer Outcomes, Public Policy, and Effectiveness Research (COPPER) Center at Yale, Dr. Yu’s research centers on the comparative effectiveness of new radiation technologies and how these new technologies are adopted nationally. Dr. Yu is currently a Senior Editor of the journal Practical Radiation Oncology, and is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Clinical Oncology - Clinical Cancer Informatics, JNCI, JNCI-Cancer Spectrum, European Urology - Oncology, Journal of Surgical Oncology, and Oncology (Williston Park), and former editorial board member of the Journal of Clinical Oncology.