Ashutosh (Ash) K. Tewari, MBBS, MCh, Chairman, Milton and Carroll Petrie Department of Urology, Mount Sinai Health System and Professor, Urology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is a world-renowned urologist and prostate cancer specialist. As Director of the Department of Urology, he leads a multidisciplinary team committed to improving prostate cancer treatment, research and education. A pioneer of daVinci robotic surgery for prostate cancer, he has performed over 5,500 robotic radical prostatectomy surgeries. Importantly he has refined the standard robotic surgical technique to improve cancer control and greatly decrease side effects, improving quality of life for his patients. In 2012, he was awarded the American Urological Association’s Gold Cystoscope Award. This honor is given annually to the urologist who has contributed significantly to the field within 10 years of completing residency. Dr. Tewari holds several leadership positions domestically and internationally.

Dr. Tewari received his undergraduate and medical degrees at GSVM Medical College (Kanpur, India). During medical school he was awarded 17 Gold Medals for outstanding performance on university exams. Dr. Tewari completed his first urology residency at Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (Lucknow, India). He completed fellowships in urologic-oncology at University of California, San Francisco and the University of Florida (Gainesville, FL). In 2004, he completed his second urology residency at Henry Ford Hospital (Detroit, Michigan). While at Henry Ford, Dr. Tewari was part of the team that performed the first robotic radical prostatectomy in the United States.

Clinical Care: Dr. Tewari’s case series is one of the largest in the world and his outcomes are considered the gold standard for this procedure. Dr. Tewari’s clinical expertise in prostate cancer includes targeted biopsies, cystoscopies, robotic prostatectomies, as well as the management of active surveillance prostate cancer patients
(he has one of the largest active surveillance cohorts). He has also initiated clinical protocols investigating
the utility of focal therapy platforms for the treatment of prostate cancer. Dr. Tewari has been consecutively
noted as a Castel Connolly and New York Magazine Top Doctor since 2006.

Research: Dr. Tewari’s research approaches the problem of prostate cancer from distinct perspectives. The Tewari Lab is working on unlocking the genomic causes of prostate cancer and translating genomic information to practical physician application through imaging.

His outcomes research group is investigating the epidemiological effects of prostate cancer. He is also investigating several novel imaging techniques for identifying prostate cancer imaging biomarkers. Another goal is to develop effective immunotherapy agents, personalized to a patient’s own tumor and with increased ability to educate a patient’s immune system to eliminate cancer. As a researcher, Dr. Tewari has authored over 250 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and textbooks on prostate cancer and robotic surgery. This includes several high-impact articles in Nature, Cell, and PNAS. Most recently he has edited Prostate Cancer: A Comprehensive Perspective (Elsevier 2013).

In addition to his publications, Dr. Tewari is the recipient of three major NIH Federal research awards. This includes an R01 grant, in which he serves as Principal Investigator, investigating the utility of multiphoton microscopy during prostate cancer treatment. Dr. Tewari also serves as site-PI for the NIH/NCI The Cancer Genome Atlas Tissue Source Site and the NIH/NCI Early Detection Research Network. In addition to his Federal funding, Dr. Tewari is currently funded by the Prostate Cancer Foundation, Boston Scientific, and Medtronic. He has initiated collaborative work with several other leading institutions including Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, he Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Rockefeller University.

Training: Dr. Tewari has trained over 40 fellows and residents in robotics. His fellows have gone on to establish successful prostate cancer programs in Canada, Great Britain, India, Japan and Singapore. Dr. Tewari hosts an annual international prostate cancer symposium. Each year nearly 1000 attendees attend this symposium
to discuss the latest breakthroughs and emerging topics in prostate cancer treatment and research. The proceedings
of this meeting are covered by European Urology (the urology journal with the highest impact factor).