News Center

Harry Bear, M.D., Ph.D., a surgical oncologist and member of the Developmental Therapeutics research program at VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center, started working at a VCU transplantation lab when he was just 14 years old. He had a deep interest in science and strong family connections on the MCV Campus: His grandfather was the first graduate to serve as dean of the VCU School of Dentistry (then part of the Medical College of Virginia), and his father served on the dental school faculty and was chair of the Department of Oral Surgery.

As a high school student working at the transplantation lab, Bear stained kidney transplant biopsies to see whether there were deposits of antibodies from the recipient.

“I spent a lot of time in a dark room looking at tissue under a microscope,” he said.

Bear continued to work there through high school and when he was home for the summer during college. After earning his bachelor’s degree at Yale University, he returned to VCU to earn a medical degree and a Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology.

While doing his residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School, Bear decided to switch from transplantation to surgical oncology.

“That’s where some of my mentors worked,” he said, “and the field appealed to me because the work is more varied and dovetailed well with running a lab focused on immunology.”

He eventually specialized in surgery for breast cancer, a disease that affected his mother and grandmother. For the past few decades, he has practiced at Massey and VCU Health in surgical oncology, taught as a professor at the VCU School of Medicine and run a preclinical research lab.

Over the years, Bear has given back generously to various causes at VCU Health, including Massey.

“They’ve been very instrumental in supporting my career,” he said, “and I’ve benefited from philanthropic support for my own research program.”

Bear also supports the educational, research and clinical initiatives of the Division of Surgical Oncology to help the next generation of cancer surgeons because, he says, “federal dollars aren’t always sufficient to support the research and talent that we need.”

This was repurposed from an article originally published by VCU Development and Alumni Relations.

Written by: Catherine Brown