Matthew J. Weiss, MD, FACS is the Deputy Physician-in-Chief and Director of Surgical Oncology for the Northwell Cancer Institute and is the Eli and Mollie Cohen Family Professor of Surgery and Oncology in the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, Lake Success, NY. He is also a Professor at the Feinstein Institute of Medical Research and an adjunct professor at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He is a board certified surgeon who specializes in diseases of the pancreas and liver. He was previously the chief of hepatobiliary surgery at Johns Hopkins, where he was also the Director of the Pancreas and Liver Multidisciplinary Clinics and the Complex General Surgical Oncology Fellowship. He has an active research program studying both basic science and translational research related to hepato-pancreato-ciliary malignancies. He serves as the Principal Investigator on numerous clinical trials that are enrolling at Northwell. He currently leads the surgical oncology program at Northwell Health, where they perform >20,000 cancer operations across 23 hospitals annually. He is considered an international leader in both liver and pancreas surgery and has authored over 300 peer reviewed publications in the field.

Dr Juan Carlos Bucobo is the Vice President of Gastroenterology Services for Northwell Health and the President and Executive Director of the Northwell GI Institute and IPA.  Dr Bucobo is committed to developing programs of excellence in gastroenterology and ensuring the delivery of top-notch, quality care to the local communities Northwell Health serves. He is an advanced endoscopist with a special interest in the diagnosis and treatment of complicated pancreaticobiliary disorders and in the resection of gastrointestinal lesions by minimally invasive, endoscopic approaches. He is committed to delivering state-of-the-art therapeutic advanced endoscopy care with compassion and sensitivity to the needs of patients and their families. Dr Bucobo is the President of the New York Society for Gastroenterology and Endoscopy (NYSGE), he is a course director for the ASGE Post Graduate Course at ACG in Vancouver and is an active member on several national committees including the ASGE Colorectal Cancer Screening Project Advisory Council. He lectures nationally and internationally on several topics related to advanced endoscopy and on reducing healthcare disparities in gastroenterology and is an author of several peer-reviewed articles, abstracts, and book chapters

Dr. Melody Cheung is an attending endocrinologist at Northwell Health. She graduated medical school from Monash University in Australia and completed Internal Medicine residency and Endocrinology Fellowship at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Subsequently, she undertook a clinical research fellowship in onco-endocrinology at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, affiliates of Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA. During this time, she also completed a PhD investigating the cardiometabolic effects of breast cancer therapies. In addition to her clinical practice, Dr. Cheung is the director of the CME program for the Division of Endocrinology at Northwell. She is also a Foundation Member of the Endocrine Society onco-endocrinology Special Interest Group. Dr. Cheung is a recipient of multiple awards including an Australia-US Fulbright Scholarship, a Postgraduate Research Scholarship from the Australian Endocrine Society and a Health Professional Research Scholarship from the National Heart Foundation of Australia.

Mitchell Cornet is the Vice President of Community Vaccines, Public Health, and Strategic Partnership for Northwell Health, where he has been instrumental in developing and implementing a comprehensive Covid-19 response plan. He oversaw all fixed vaccine locations and coordinates pop-up vaccine missions throughout the organization’s service area. He also works with state, local, and community partners to promote vaccine and public health initiatives in Northwell’s eleven priority communities.

In addition to his work in the Covid-19 response, Mitchell is a leading voice in the Community and Population Health Department, where he promotes maternal health and cancer education. He has spearheaded initiatives to increase education during the Antepartum stage of pregnancy, improve maternal health outcomes, and raise awareness about the importance of cancer screening and prevention, clinical trials, and research.

Mitchell’s passion for promoting health equity is also reflected in his work with Federally Qualified Health Centers, where he has forged close relationships with these critical community-based providers. His collaborative efforts with them have significantly improved healthcare access for underserved populations.

Before taking on his current role, Mitchell was the Senior Administrative Director for Northwell Health Medicine Service Line in the Western Region, where he was responsible for operational and budgetary oversight of Northwell Health Physician Practices (NHPP) Internal Medicine and Medicine Specialty practices in Manhattan, Staten Island, and Brooklyn. Mitchell’s dedication to healthcare has earned him a reputation as a leader in the industry, and he continues to make significant contributions to public health and healthcare access initiatives in his current position.

Danielle DePeralta, MD, FACS is double board-certified in surgery and surgical oncology, with dual fellowship training in complex surgical oncology and hepato-pancreato-biliary surgery. She specializes in surgical treatment of diseases of the liver, pancreas, and gastrointestinal tract.

Named a Castle Connolly Top Doctor in 2021 and 2022, Dr. DePeralta is a leader in her field and is an active member of the Society of Surgical Oncology, American College of Surgeons and International Hepatopancreatobiliary Association. She is the Northwell Physician Champion for the Canopy Cancer Collective, a multi-center team that focuses on improving care for patients with pancreatic cancer. She is also heavily involved in clinical trials and innovations related to cancer care, including regional therapies that target cancer that has spread but is still localized to the liver or peritoneal cavity. She was instrumental in bringing pressurized intraperitoneal aerosolized chemotherapy (PIPAC)-a treatment that can help those with few options-to New York. Long Island Jewish Medical Center is now one of only three sites in the nation to offer such therapy.

Treating some of the most aggressive cancers, Dr. DePeralta knows she’s seeing patients at their most vulnerable moments. While focusing on giving them their lives back, she often forms close relationships with her patients. “I try to treat all of my patients the way that I hope someone would care for my mother, my husband, my son,” she says.

Connecting with patients meaningfully is important to Dr. DePeralta, who has a special interest in the human side of medicine. She studied philosophy in college alongside molecular biology and biochemistry. She also completed a medical ethics fellowship during her surgical residency training at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School. Her training has taken her around the world to Uganda, Panama and India, which has fueled her interest in global health and quality health care for all.

Her compassion is also shared by her team, from the care navigators and office staff to the nurses and residents. “We’re very lucky to be so well-supported with a great team that cares a lot about our patients,” Dr. DePeralta says.

Having a team like this serves to strengthen the bonds with her patients, who she learns from each day. “They teach me that you have to keep trying-keep pushing and it’s my job to keep supporting them.It’s extremely rewarding to treat someone who was very sick, who you see a year down the road is cancer-free and living a normal life.”

Board certifications
Surgery – American Board of Surgery
Surgical Oncology – Am Board of Surgery / Complex Gen Surg Oncology

Academic titles
Assistant Professor, Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell

Education
Tufts University School of Medicine

Residencies
Massachusetts General Hospital

Fellowships
Indiana University Hospitals School of Medicine
H Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Inst

Michael Erdek, MD, MA joined the Northwell Health Cancer Institute in December 2022 as director of pain management. He is also a faculty member in the departments of anesthesiology and oncology at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell.

Dr. Erdek concentrated his undergraduate education in humanities, classics and philosophy courses, deciding in his senior year of college he wished to pursue a career in medicine. He subsequently earned his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a Walter Lewis Croll Scholar.

After residency training that combined three years of general surgery and three years of anesthesiology, he began to focus on pain management, particularly for cancer patients. “For some of these patients, the pain is debilitating and medication either isn’t working, or the dosage has to be so high that their quality of life is impacted,” he says. “I’d learned about ways of blocking, ablating, or stimulating nerves, or even a process involving infusing drugs directly to the central nervous system. I thought that was amazing. That really kicked off my desire to see what else could be done for these patients.”

While doing a fellowship in interventional pain medicine at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center in 2000, Dr. Erdek saw that the specialty was in an early growth phase but showed tremendous promise for changing lives. He remained on faculty at Johns Hopkins for 20 years after completing fellowship training, alternately holding roles as director of the chronic inpatient pain service, director of quality assurance, and director of the multidisciplinary pain medicine fellowship.

Along the way, Dr. Erdek became a leading authority on pain management, publishing research and lecturing extensively on the topic. He’s a member of the editorial boards for several journals in the domain of pain medicine and has investigated clinical applications of options like neuromodulation therapy, which is used to treat conditions of spasticity, neuropathic pain and advanced vascular disease.

Dr. Erdek joined Northwell in order to build a robust interventional pain management program that could be utilized system-wide, at all Northwell locations, in order to bring innovative and meaningful treatments to patients, especially to those suffering from advanced cancer pain. In addition to his work building the program, he also sees patients and still feels grateful to be able to offer some measure of relief.

“What I want the patients who see me to feel is hope, as well as a sense of comfort,” says Dr. Erdek. “Not every patient can get complete relief, but there’s always something that can be done, and I strive to listen and to care. Sometimes, just feeling heard, along with the patient’s confidence in the doctor’s abilities, can go a long way toward helping control pain.”

Maged Ghaly, MD, is a board-certified radiation oncologist and came to us from Huntington Hospital in Huntington, which is also a member of Northwell Health, where he served as an attending physician of Radiation Oncology. After he completed his residency and fellowship in Radiation Oncology at New York Methodist Hospital, (Weill Medical College of Cornell University) and member of the New York-Presbyterian Healthcare System, Dr. Ghaly was appointed as an instructor in clinical radiology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. With a strong clinical background in Surgical Oncology at Cairo National Cancer Institute, Dr. Ghaly has focused on various aspects of radiation therapy including brachytherapy procedures, robotic stereotactic body radiation therapy, volumetric arc therapy and complex head and neck, lung, and GI malignancies. Dr. Ghaly was the first physician to offer 3-D image-based brachytherapy treatments for skin, rectal, gynecological malignancies and multi-channel balloon partial breast radiation on Long Island during his tenure as an attending physician in radiation oncology at

Huntington Hospital. Dr. Ghaly has participated in several research projects which have resulted in many publications and numerous presentations at National and International meetings. Dr. Ghaly received his medical degree from Cairo University, Faculty of Medicine in Cairo, Egypt.

Sepideh Gholami, MD, is a highly accomplished surgical oncologist and hepatobiliary surgeon who serves as the Director of the Liver Multidisciplinary Clinic and Hepatic Artery Infusion Pump Program at Northwell Health. Additionally, she holds a joint appointment as the Director for Translational Research in Surgical Oncology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Her internationally recognized research focuses on developing new drugs for colon cancer that has spread to the liver. “Research is a very big part of what I love about this job. We study pathways of drug resistance and tumor growth to find new immunotherapy for patients with liver tumors. The addition of science makes the job of a surgeon even more exciting. We take questions from bedside to the laboratory and translate what we learn in the laboratory back to bedside. It’s two-way street.”

Her mother’s diagnosis with breast cancer sparked her original interest in oncology and drug development research. “I want to change the future treatment landscape and keep pushing the envelope to improve experience and outcomes for cancer patients,” Gholami says. She started her scientific experience as an undergraduate student and solidified her passion for oncology while completing medical school and residency at Stanford University. She completed fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in complex general surgical oncology and hepatobiliary surgery. Dr. Gholami worked at University of California, Davis before joining Northwell, where she established an innovative liver surgery and translational research program while introducing the region’s first Hepatic Artery Infusion Pump program.

At Northwell, she credits the work to a long list of team members—including nurse practitioners, navigators, clinicians, and ancillary staff—for providing high-quality care. “It’s the larger team and program that takes care of the patient” she says. “We all have the same vision: taking care of patients in a personalized fashion,” she says. “We carry that attitude into the laboratory, striving to develop new drugs and practice-changing clinical trials.”

Born in Iran, Dr. Gholami arrived to Germany as a refugee at age 5 and immigrated to the US at 17 with English as third language. Her immigrant experience gives her an expanded perspective on patient care. “It helps me assimilate to patients from diverse backgrounds and hopefully provide the most compassionate care, which is something I always aspire to do.”

Regina Jacob, MD, joined Northwell Health in November 2022 and specializes in internal medicine. She is also an associate professor at Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell.

Although Dr. Jacob always been driven to help people, her career path didn’t start with medicine. Instead, she studied engineering, but soon realized that profession lacked a more direct impact on people’s lives. After making the pivot to medical school at George Washington University, followed by residency at Temple University Hospital, she found that her earlier education wasn’t wasted.

“Once I switched to medicine, I discovered that the way engineering focuses on problem solving and finding new solutions was very relevant to patient care, and I still bring those skills into what I do every day,” she says. Dr. Jacob chose internal medicine because she wanted to see the widest range of patients and conditions, with a particular interest in cancer survivorship topics, based on personal experience.

“I have a family member who was diagnosed with cancer at a young age, and I saw there were gaps in her care after she completed treatment,” says Dr. Jacob. “I wanted to put all my resources and efforts into closing those care gaps.” Often, after the intensity of cancer treatment, patients may feel abandoned, not just by medical professionals but also by family, friends, and other parts of their support community. That can lead to significant psychological challenges. Dr. Jacob chose Northwell in large part because of its comprehensive and meaningful approach to cancer care.

She brings that compassion into other types of patient care as well, offering a holistic perspective that takes all aspects of an illness, injury or trauma into consideration. That means listening to patients, so they feel heard, and helping to untangle the complexity of a diagnosis.

“Part of a good health outcome means maintaining the very real, very close relationship that a physician has to a patient,” she says. “That’s based on human connection and recognizing the mental health aspects of a specific diagnosis and treatment plan. Physical wellbeing and mental wellbeing are tied together, so addressing both is what a holistic approach to care is all about.”

Daniel King, MD PhD, is a gastrointestinal medical oncologist based at the R.J. Zuckerberg Cancer Center and Director of Research and Development for the Northwell Health Cancer Institute’s Center for Genomic Medicine. As an academic oncologist and active researcher, he aims to deliver the latest advances uncovered through clinical trials, breakthrough technologies, and targeted therapies, to his patients. Prior to completing medical school, he pursued scientific investigation aimed at uncovering the underpinnings of cancer. These experiences included a fellowship as a Howard Hughes Research Scholar at the National Institutes of Health and as a PhD student at the Wellcome Sanger Genomic Institute at the University of Cambridge, UK, where he studied genomics and bioinformatics. More recently, Dr. King trained in medical oncology at Stanford University where he conducted translational research in pancreatic cancer and has published in peer-reviewed journals. At Northwell, in addition to his active medical practice, he conducts clinical research in partnership with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he is a clinical scholar in the laboratory of Dr. Dave Tuveson. Dr. King is board-certified in Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology and is an active member of the American Association of Cancer Research.

Dr. Sandeep Nadella is a board certified Gastroenterologist in the Division of Gastroenterology at Northwell Health. He primarily sees patients at North Shore University Hospital. He is the Donaldson Fellow in Dr. David Tuveson’s Laboratory where he studies fibroblasts in the context of inflammatory conditions of the pancreas including cancer. His clinical research interests include identification and treatment of pre-neoplastic conditions of the pancreas. Prior to joining in Northwell, Dr. Nadella completed his translational post-doctoral fellowship in Dr. Jill Smith’s laboratory and Clinical Fellowship in Gastroenterology at Georgetown University

Leila Tchelebi, MD, joined Northwell Health in 2021 as a radiation oncologist, and is an assistant professor at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell.

“As the daughter of 2 physicians, I learned from an early age that medicine is a great way to have a positive impact on society and also on individuals and their families,” she says.

After graduating from NYU School of Medicine, Dr. Tchelebi did her residency at New York Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital. She appreciates how cancer care is a unique aspect of medicine, involving science and innovation, but also mental health and emotional support. She enjoys collaborating with other disciplines in caring for patients, and also connecting with both patients and their families.

“I think I bring a sense of compassion and enthusiasm to patient care,” she says. “I take a holistic approach to my patients, including ensuring an appropriate support system and overall health.”

An aspect of Northwell she finds particularly compelling is the integration of professionals across the health network. This leads to a larger, team-based approach for every patient’s treatment, no matter where a patient is receiving care, she adds.

“In my research, I focus on standardization of care, because I don’t believe the quality of a patient’s care should be based on where they live,” she says. “Northwell is a leader in creating and following standards to deliver the highest quality care for patients.”

Dr. Tchelebi’s other research area is gastrointestinal (GI) oncology. She’s contributed her insights to guidelines on the treatment of several GI cancers, including pancreas, stomach, and hepatobiliary, and she wrote international guidelines on managing GI patients during Covid. She’s involved with several national committees geared toward GI oncology, innovation, and quality, and she looks forward to advancing the field through science — all with the aim of continuing to follow her passion for ensuring the best in patient outcomes.

Brooke Tortorella is a Sr. Director, Operations, at the Northwell Health Cancer Institute. Currently, she is responsible for providing administrative leadership, organization, infrastructure and services to support the translational strategic partnership between the Cancer Institute and the Cancer Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.  Prior to taking on this role, Brooke has been working to implement a comprehensive cancer survivorship program for the health system that monitors patients from diagnosis forward, delivering timely and effective care.  In addition, Brooke partners with the Community and Population Health team to develop community engagement and outreach efforts around cancer and cancer-related illness through 1) education & outreach, 2) engagement on research/clinical trials, and 3) access to cancer screening and prevention.  Brooke is incredibly passionate about understanding the needs of her surrounding community and working to deliver high-quality healthcare that is accessible and personalized to the needs of the patient.

Before transitioning to Northwell Health, Brooke worked at NewYork-Presbyterian (NYP) as a Director of Practice Operations where she oversaw 10 multi-specialty outpatient practices, including financial and operational performance, new programmatic growth/site expansion, and patient access and experience.  Prior to this, she spent six years at NYU Langone Health as an Assistant Director of Ambulatory Operations.  During her tenue at NYU, Brooke collaborated with physician practices to keep them running smoothly, both operationally and financially, to provide patients with top quality, integrated, accessible care.  Her work efforts included business planning, financial monitoring and budgeting and a variety of strategic initiatives.

Brooke started her professional career as a healthcare consultant, where she developed her project management and process improvement and optimization skills.

She received her Bachelor of Science degree from The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia and her Master of Public Health with a concentration in Community Health Science and Practice from New York University in New York

Tiffany Zavadsky is a Nurse Practitioner in surgical oncology specializing in the management of hepatobiliary patients. In addition to her clinical practice, she leads the clinical side of Cancer Care Direct (CCD) in conjunction with the Cancer Institute.  CCD connects patients with a new cancer diagnosis or concerning finding with disease-specific nurse navigators. Tiffany is a member of the iNav team that won Northwell’s 2023 Innovation Challenge for Care Delivery. iNav is an identification and navigation service that mitigates the gaps and breakdowns in providing pancreas cancer patients with optimal care. She is the surgical lead of Northwell’s Advanced Practice Oncology Fellowship Program that prepares ACPs in the diagnosis and management of oncology patients and supports the transition into clinical practice.

Prior to coming to Northwell, Tiffany spent 11 years at The Johns Hopkins Hospital.  She developed and implemented enhanced recovery pathways for liver and pancreas surgeries and presented at international meetings and authored publications in this field. She established and managed educational sessions for patients and caregivers undergoing hepatopancreaticobiliary operations and her work was showcased at an international conference on patient-centered care