Scientific Director, University of Tennessee/West Institute for Cancer Research, and the Van Vleet Endowed Professor in Medical Oncology in the Department of Medicine (Division of Hematology‐Oncology).

Dr. Hayes’ research converges interests in multidisciplinary clinical care, clinical trials, translational cancer research, genomics, and model systems of cancer, with a focus on lung and head and neck cancers.  In the lab, he uses genetic and genomic techniques to characterize molecular alterations of cancer for the purposes of describing new patterns of clinically relevant disease and translating into includes biomarker discovery and validation.  Dr. Hayes currently is in his 10th year as a leader in efforts surrounding the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), the pivotal genomic sequencing project of the decade.  His most notable accomplishments in this area include co‐leading the sequencing of RNA for most of the project, and playing a senior role in more than 20 manuscripts reported in Cell, Nature, and the New England Journal.

Early work by Dr. Hayes, performed in collaboration with his mentor Dr. Matthew Meyerson on human lung adenocarcinoma expression arrays from the National Cancer Institute revealed three reproducible molecular tumor subtypes of lung adenocarcinoma that are otherwise indistinguishable by routine clinical evaluation.  These subtypes possess statistically significant survival differences, independent of disease stage and are comprised of tumors with differing underlying rates of mutations in key lung cancer genes including KRAS and EGFR.  Similar findings for four subtypes of squamous cell carcinoma of the lung were also discovered and published.

Dr. Hayes most recently served as co‐leader of the University of North Carolina (UNC) Lineberger Clinical Research Program, professor in the Division of Hematology/Oncology and the Department of Otolaryngology/Head and Neck Cancer Surgery, and director of Clinical Bioinformatics at UNC.  Dr. Hayes lists more than 120 peer‐reviewed manuscripts in the last decade in the field of cancer research.  He received his BS from Davidson College, his MD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, his MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health and his MS from Tufts New England Medical Center. He completed his residency training in Internal Medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine, and additional fellowships in Hematology/Oncology at Tufts New England Medical Center and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.