Dr. R. Taylor Ripley serves as the Director of the Mesothelioma Treatment Center and is a highly esteemed, board-certified thoracic surgeon with a specialization in mesothelioma and thoracic surgical oncology. His expertise extends to chest wall tumors, lung cancer, esophageal cancer and thymoma/thymic carcinoma.
Dr. Ripley is renowned for his proficiency in robotic surgery, which allows him to perform minimally invasive procedures for various thoracic diseases. His skills also encompass a wide range of general thoracic surgery aspects, including infectious lung disease, benign esophageal conditions and endoluminal interventions.
Before joining the faculty at Baylor College of Medicine, Dr. Ripley held the position of Associate Professor of Surgery at the National Cancer Institute, NIH. During his tenure at NIH, he received the NCI Director’s Innovation Award for his groundbreaking work on targeting specific p53-mutations for treating esophageal adenocarcinoma. He established the Foregut Team at the NIH Clinical Center, dedicated to managing patients with esophageal cancer, and initiated robotic thoracic surgery at the NCI, NIH. His research also focused on metabolic reprogramming of thoracic cancer.
Dr. Ripley’s extensive training includes a fellowship at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, where he received expert guidance in caring for patients with mesothelioma from world-renowned surgeons. Additionally, he completed a fellowship in Surgical Oncology at the NCI, NIH, following his general surgery residency at the University of Colorado. He earned his Medical Doctorate from Vanderbilt University.
