Fall 2026 Innovation Summit

Dr. Ford is a tenured professor and Vice Chair of Departmental Excellence and Engagement in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC). She is the Associate Director of Community Outreach and Engagement at the NCI-designated MUSC Hollings Cancer Center (HCC), where Dr. Raymond DuBois is Director. She completed her undergraduate training at Cornell University, and she completed her graduate and postdoctoral fellowship training at the University of Michigan.

Regarding her overall academic focus, three of her career objectives are to 1) conduct cancer population health educational activities with community partners in SC; 2) develop specific, targeted research to reduce cancer disparities; and 3) increase the number of investigators in SC who conduct cancer population health research. As a member of the MUSC-HCC’s Cancer Prevention and Control Program, she is a behavioral scientist with a strong commitment to cancer health research, particularly in the recruitment and retention of different populations for cancer research studies and in intervention design and conduct. She is a co-investigator of the multi-site National Cancer Institute-funded Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian (PLCO) Cancer Screening Trial. She has also led several ancillary PLCO studies funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the NCI, as well as other studies, and testing strategies to enhance the recruitment and retention of Black people to clinical trials.

Dr. Ford co-leads the MUSC HCC-funded Minority/Underserved NCI Community Oncology Research Program (NCORP), one of only 14 institutions in the US. She is also the MPI, with Dr. Robert Winn at the Virginia Commonwealth University and Louise Henderson from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, of a new multi-state, multi-institutional Stand Up to Cancer grant. The first aim of the study is to initiate and evaluate a high-impact, multimodal, and multilevel navigation intervention to promote lung cancer screening among Black people from both rural and urban medically underserved communities in Virginia, SC, and North Carolina. The second aim is to develop a robust, shared population-based cohort and biorepository to further support research in understanding biologic determinants or risk factors for poor lung cancer outcomes among Blacks from the three participating states. This “cell-to-society” approach is expected to create a sustainable research infrastructure and to develop better methods to identify those at the highest risk for a diagnosis of, and/or poor treatment outcomes for, lung cancer. This is South Carolina’s first Stand Up to Cancer award.

Dr. Ford is the author or co-author of more than 140 peer-reviewed scientific papers. She co-edited the 2017 and 2020 Advances in Cancer Research volumes titled “Cancer Disparities” and “Cancer Health Equity,” respectively, and has published nine book chapters. Dr. Ford also holds a SmartState Endowed Chair in Cancer Population Health with South Carolina State University.

Over the past three years, Dr. Ford has received numerous awards, including a 2022 MUSC Earl B. Higgins University Leadership in Diversity Award, a 2022 Remarkable Woman of the Lowcountry Award, a 2023 Top 25 Diversity Leader in Healthcare in the US award, a 2024 National Immunization Champions Award, and a 2025 Diamond of the Community Award for Service in the field of Medicine from the Charleston Alumni Chapter of the Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Inc.