Thomas Tucker, PhD, MPH

Thomas C. Tucker, PhD, MPH, Received his undergraduate degree from the University of Kansas in 1968, his master’s degree from the University of Michigan in 1982 and his PhD from the University of Kentucky in 2001. He is currently the Senior Director for Cancer Surveillance at the University of Kentucky, Markey Cancer Center (MCC). He was the Associate Director for Cancer Prevention and Control from 2004 through 2020, and he was the Director of the Kentucky Cancer Registry (KCR), Principal Investigator for the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) program, and Principal Investigator for the Centers for Disease Control and prevention (CDC) National Program of Cancer Registries (NPCR) in Kentucky from 2000 until June of 2018 when he stepped down from these leadership roles as part of a long planned transition. He was the founding chair and is a professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Kentucky’s College of Public Health. He is an internationally recognized population scientist with more than 45 years of experience in cancer surveillance and cancer control research. Dr. Tucker was elected as one of two North American Representatives to serve on the International Association of Cancer Registries (IACR) Board of Directors and he is a member of the Advisory Board for CONCORD-2, an international study of cancer survival in more than 67 countries. He is the past President of the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries (NAACCR) and in 2002 he received NAACCR’s highest honor, the Calum Muir Award, for lifetime contributions to the science of cancer surveillance. His research is focused on disparities in the burden of lung, colorectal, breast and cervical cancer with an emphasis on Appalachian populations and using the population-based cancer registry as a Virtual Tissue Repository (VTR).