About Jennifer R. Grandis
Jennifer R. Grandis, M.D., is a physician-scientist, academic leader, and author whose career has been shaped by both groundbreaking cancer research and firsthand experience navigating the realities of academic medicine. She is currently a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Francisco.
For more than three decades, Dr. Grandis has conducted translational cancer research focused on head and neck cancer, working at the intersection of laboratory discovery and patient care. Her work has advanced precision medicine approaches by identifying critical signaling pathways and genomic alterations and translating those findings into clinically relevant models and therapies. She has published over 400 peer-reviewed papers in leading journals, including Science, Nature, and Cancer Cell, and has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health since joining the faculty in 1993.
Alongside her scientific work, Dr. Grandis has spent much of her career building research infrastructure and fostering collaboration between clinicians and investigators—first at the University of Pittsburgh and, since 2015, at UCSF. Over time, these leadership roles sharpened her focus on how institutional culture, power, and gender shape who advances—and who does not—in medicine and science.
That perspective is at the heart of Harsh Medicine, her first book. Drawing on personal experience, observation, and decades inside elite academic institutions, Dr. Grandis examines why women continue to face structural barriers in science and healthcare, even at the highest levels of achievement.
Dr. Grandis is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians, and the National Academy of Medicine. She has been an American Cancer Society Research Professor since 2008, and her work carries an H-index of 110, reflecting its broad and lasting impact.
She earned her undergraduate degree from Swarthmore College, where she double-majored in Art History and Biology, and graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
Alongside her scientific work, Dr. Grandis has spent much of her career building research infrastructure and fostering collaboration between clinicians and investigators—first at the University of Pittsburgh and, since 2015, at UCSF. Over time, these leadership roles sharpened her focus on how institutional culture, power, and gender shape who advances—and who does not—in medicine and science.
In Harsh Medicine, Dr. Grandis shares what she’s learned from a lifetime inside academic medicine, inviting readers to confront the structural forces that determine who rises, who stalls, and why change has been so slow.