Dr. William E. Carson III is a U.S. board certified surgeon and a formally trained surgical oncologist who has been engaged in the study of the immune response to cancer for the past two decades. Dr. Carson’s laboratory began in 1995 at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute when he was appointed as an assistant professor of surgical oncology at the State University of New York (SUNY) in Buffalo. The Carson laboratory moved to The Ohio State University in June of 1997. Dr. Carson is currently a professor of surgery in Ohio State’s Department of Surgery and maintains a clinical practice in breast cancer and melanoma surgery at the OSU Comprehensive Cancer Center (OSUCCC – James). He is the associate director for clinical research at the OSUCCC – James and is the interim medical director of its clinical trials office. He is also currently the chair for the OSU Cancer Institutional Review Board. Dr. Carson was rated in the top 10 percent of physicians in the nation for patient satisfaction in 2017.

Clinically, Dr. Carson evaluates women with breast problems in his clinic at the Stefanie Spielman Comprehensive Breast Center and performs surgery on women with breast cancer at the James Cancer Hospital. He works closely with specialists in radiology, pathology, radiation oncology and medical oncology to provide integrated and innovative care to his patients. In addition to his work with breast cancer patients, Dr. Carson develops phase one and two clinical trials for patients with advanced melanoma based on his lab findings that he conducts in collaboration with Drs. Jeter, Olencki and Kendra in the Division of Medical Oncology. These studies use immune-based treatments and targeted agents to destroy cancer cells in a more specific manner than standard chemotherapy.

Dr. Carson is the Ohio State institutional PI for the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN), a group of 24 cancer centers that have joined together to develop guidelines for the care of cancer patients. Dr. Carson serves on the NCCN Melanoma Guidelines Panel for OSU. He is also currently vice-chair of the SWOG Melanoma Committee for Translational Medicine. SWOG, formerly known as the Southwest Oncology Group, is an important cancer clinical trials cooperative group. In this role, Dr. Carson works to develop and implement novel correlative laboratory studies for investigational studies.

In his role as an immunotherapy translational leader in the Translational Therapeutics program, Dr. Carson encourages and facilitates the development of novel immunotherapeutic clinical studies. Dr. Carson has a basic immunology laboratory and has extensive experience in the design, conduct and analysis of clinical trials that employ strategies to harness the immune response to cancer.