• Medical School
  Albert Einstein College of Medicine, 1998
• Residency
  General Surgery, UMDNJ Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, 2005
• Fellowship
  Surgical Critical Care, Stanford University School of Medicine, 2009
• Fellowship
  Breast Surgical Oncology, UCSF School of Medicine, 2019

See a list of published articles by Daphne Ly, MD

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Current Research and Scholarly Interests:

1. Integrate machine learning with electronic health record system to improve work flow and achieve individualized cancer care based on current evidence
2. Apply Cancer Genetics and Data Sciences in cancer treatment, prevention, risk reduction and early detection
3. DCIS risk stratification and treatment.

• Breast and Cutaneous Surgical Oncology
• Cancer Genetic
• Data Sciences

How did you fall in love with your field?

I am an engineer at heart. I love being able to understand how things work and fix or improve them. A career in surgery, especially cancer surgery, allows me to not only use my skills and knowledge to fix the problem, I am able to improve the patient's quality of life and/or survival. Being a breast cancer surgeon, I am able to do a few things that are unique to breast cancer treatment.

There has been significant improvements in all aspects of breast cancer treatment over the past few decades. Women survive for a long time post cancer treatment; therefore, it is no longer enough to just remove the cancer and leave the women to live with the deformity for a few decades of their life. The challenge is to perform an oncologically safe [procedure] but also leaving the breast with a cosmetically pleasing appearance. 

A breast surgeon has the opportunity to remove the cancer and restore the breasts to at least the same or better form than before surgery giving the patients a bit of a silver lining for having cancer. In addition, the current in-depth knowledge of breast cancer enable us to individualize the therapy, so each patient can receive the amount needed to reduce toxicity and side effects from the therapies. Last but not least is the availability of various tools and imaging modalities to allow us to assess the patient’s risk and devise a plan to reduce and/or prevent breast/ovarian cancer from occurring. 

My goal is to focus my effort in developing ways to individualize cancer treatment, cancer prevention, risk reduction and early detection. I look forward to being able to collaborate with basic science researchers at UNMC and integrate my skill and knowledge in data science, cancer genetic and breast surgical oncology to develop a high risk clinic with longitudinal follow up to achieve this goal.

Three things people may not know about me

• I have three crazy but adorable miniature poodles. I groom them myself and do agility training with them.
• I was born in Vietnam, came to the United State as a refugee, grew up and obtained most of my education here.
• I was a software engineer for 7 years prior to starting medical school.