Board-certified by the American Board of Thoracic Surgery, R. Taylor Ripley, MD, serves as the Director of the Mesothelioma Treatment Center at Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center. He joined the Lung Institute and Dan L. Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center at Baylor St. Luke’s as a dedicated mesothelioma expert, complementing the established multidisciplinary team. In addition to mesothelioma, Dr. Ripley specializes in thoracic surgical oncology including lung, thymic, chest wall and esophageal cancers. He is an expert in robotic thoracic surgery and approaches most diseases minimally-invasively.
Dr. Ripley was recruited by the late Dr. David J. Sugarbaker to join Baylor College of Medicine after serving as an associate professor of surgery and a principal investigator at the National Cancer Institute (NIH). While at NIH, Dr. Ripley started the Thoracic Robotics Program and the NIH Foregut Team. His laboratory efforts focus on the metabolic reprogramming of cancer cells to determine whether it will increase the susceptibility to therapeutics. His laboratory is developing whether the clinically relevant assay called ‘Dynamic BH3 Profiling’ can predict the most appropriate therapy to enhance the precision-medicine based approach to patient care.
Prior to his faculty position at the National Cancer Institute, he completed his Thoracic-Track Fellowship at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. During that time, he was a visiting thoracic fellow in the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He completed a research fellowship in Surgical Oncology in the Surgery Branch, National Cancer Institute, NIH. He completed Residency in General Surgery at the University of Colorado Denver. He received his medical degree from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and a bachelor of science in biochemistry from Boston College graduating as Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa.
