Personal tragedy started a journey that became a calling: to ensure her community had access to state of the art, advanced cancer care close to home.
Serving as caregiver to family members and losing them at a young age to battles against cancer sparked within her a passionate desire to change the scope of cancer care within our region.
ETSU Health is proud to welcome Surgical Oncologist Dr. Jennifer Whittington, MD, Ph.D., FACS, FSSO, to their Surgery clinic as she returns home from prestigious, advanced training and seven years of surgical oncology practice.
“Being a surgical oncologist is not just a profession, it is my calling,” Dr. Whittington said.
“I pursued the long and requisite training to become a board-certified surgical oncologist because I experienced and truly understand the deep need to have access to this state-of-the-art care to the people of Appalachia.
“I consider it my privilege and honor to bring my extensive training and expertise from some of the best cancer centers in the world back home to serve my people,” she added. “My goal is to treat each of my patients as if they were my own family and be their fiercest advocate for timely and expert multidisciplinary cancer care close to home.”
Dr. Whittington has extensive experience in robotic surgical techniques and specializes in caring for patients who have cancers of the pancreas, liver, stomach, colon, rectum and those with melanoma and sarcoma skin cancers.
She will additionally provide regional therapies that will include heated intraperitoneal chemotherapy (HIPEC) and hepatic artery infusion (HAI) for some stage 4 cancers. These therapies allow for targeted chemotherapy treatments, which helps to protect other systems from the side effects of chemotherapy.
Dr. Whittington is board-certified in general surgery and complex general surgical oncology. She earned an M.D. from ETSU Quillen College of Medicine. Dr. Whittington completed a general surgery residency at the University of Kentucky and received a prestigious NIH- T32 award to pursue research dedicated to understanding tumor metabolism. She completed a Ph.D. in clinical and translational sciences at the University of Kentucky. She completed a clinical fellowship in Complex General Surgical Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons.
She is a member of the American College of Surgeons, Society of Surgical Oncology, Americas Hepato-Pancreatobiliary Association, American Pancreatic Association, Association of Women Surgeons, and Association for Academic Surgery.
ETSU Health Surgery is located at 325 N. State of Franklin Road in Johnson City. For more information, call (423) 439-7201 or visit ETSUHealth.org.
With 30 clinical sites and more than 300 health care providers, ETSU Health is on the front lines of efforts to improve the health of Northeast Tennessee by offering leading-edge health care in dozens of specialties.
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ETSU Health is the outward-facing brand that includes the pursuits of ETSU’s thriving Academic Health Science Center and the clinical components of ETSU Physicians & Associates and Northeast Tennessee Community Health Centers Inc. For more, visit ETSUHealth.org.
