Commencement

U-M SCHOOL OF NURSING COMMENCEMENT SPEAKERS

Lori J. Pierce, MD, FASCO, FASTRO, is a Professor of Radiation Oncology, School of Medicine; Adjunct Professor of Department of Systems, Populations and Leadership, School of Nursing; and Vice Provost for Academic and Faculty Affairs, University of Michigan.

Dr. Pierce has dedicated her career to the treatment of breast cancer patients. Her research focuses on the use of radiotherapy in the multi-modality treatment of breast cancer, with emphasis on intensity modulated radiotherapy in node positive breast cancer, the use of radiosensitizing agents, and the outcomes of women treated with radiation for breast cancer who are carriers of a BRCA1/2 breast cancer susceptibility gene.

She serves as Director of the Michigan Radiation Oncology Quality Consortium (MROQC), a quality consortium of radiation oncology practices across the state of Michigan that seeks to establish best practices in the treatment of breast and lung cancers. This initiative is funded by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan and Blue Care Network. She is a previous member of the NCI Breast Cancer Steering Committee and previously served on the Steering Committee for the Early Breast Cancer Trialists’ Collaborative Group at the University of Oxford.

She continues to serve on many U.S. breast cancer boards and committees and was recently selected to be a member of the Breast Cancer Research Foundation Scientific Advisory Board.

Ellen M. Lavoie Smith, Ph.D., MSN, RN, AOCN®, FAAN, is a Professor, Assistant Dean for Research and Scholarship, the Marie O’Koren Endowed Chair, and Co-Director of the Cancer Prevention and Control T32 training program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Nursing.

Her research is well recognized as pioneering and pivotal in identifying treatments for chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN), a life-altering complication for which no known preventative treatments have been discovered. She received research funding from the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Cancer Institute, resulting in the discovery of the first and only known treatment for painful CIPN to date, which is now recommended by the American Society of Clinical Oncology (JCO, 2020).

She leads a large National Cancer Institute-funded multisite Phase II-III trial to now test duloxetine to prevent CIPN. Dr. Smith lectures nationally and internationally regarding cancer symptom management, leads multinational groups of like-minded scientists, and has published over 100 peer-reviewed manuscripts. As recognition for her pioneering work, Dr. Smith has received numerous national awards.