C. Richard Boland MD

Richard (Rick) Boland, MD, AGAF, is a gastroenterologist and Professor of Medicine at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine. He is from in upstate New York, USA, received a BA from The University of Notre Dame and an MD from Yale Medical School. He has a career-long research interest in colon cancer, specifically focusing on the genetic causes of colon cancer and familial cancer syndromes.

Dr. Boland started studying familial colorectal cancer as a medical student, where he proposed a novel familial aspect of the disease. His initial research was with Young S. Kim, MD, at UCSF, studying glycoprotein biochemistry in colorectal cancer. In 1990, at the U of Michigan, he turned his focus to the molecular genetics of colorectal cancer in a sabbatical in the HHMI, and resumed work on the hereditary colorectal cancer disease, which he named “Lynch Syndrome.” He was among the first gastroenterologists to explore “microsatellite instability” in cancer, and his laboratory developed the first in vitro models to study the basic biology of Lynch Syndrome. In recent years, he has contributed to our understanding of the genetic and epigenetic basis of colorectal cancer.

Dr. Boland has been funded continuously by NIH since 1979, has served on multiple NIH (and other) Study Sections and was the chair of the Clinical Integrative Molecular Gastroenterology Study Section from 2014 to 2016, and was on the Multisociety Task for on Colorectal Cancer from 2012-18. He has published over 400 papers, has an H-Index of 92, and has written authoritative chapters for several textbooks of Internal Medicine, Gastroenterology and Genetics. He was elected into the Association of American Physicians in 2001. Dr. Boland was president of the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) from 2011-2012, was given the AGA Oncology Section Distinguished Mentor Award, the AGA Beaumont Prize for his research in 2015, and the AGA Friedenwald Medal in 2016.