The U-M Board of Regents announced the appointment of Ganesh S. Palapattu, M.D., FACS as chair of Michigan Medicine’s Department of Urology. He replaces outgoing chair David Bloom, M.D., who served for 12 years. Palapattu began his role on February 1.

Dr. Palapattu has served as Chief of Urologic Oncology at Michigan Medicine since 2012 and is the George F. and Sandy G. Valassis Professor of Urology. He has also served as the co-director of the Genitourinary Oncology Program for the Rogel Cancer Center since 2015 and program director of theUrology Care Foundation Physician Scientist Residency Training program since 2017.

He attended the University of Texas at Austin where he earned a bachelor of arts degree in Humanities and then Baylor College of Medicine in Houston for medical school. Dr. Palapattu completed his surgical internship, urologic training and chief residency in urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and completed a laboratory research fellowship in Urologic Oncology at the Johns Hopkins Hospital/Brady Urological Institute.

He joined the U-M faculty as Associate Professor and Chief of the Division of Urologic Oncology in the Department of Urology in 2012 after having held faculty appointments at the University of Rochester and Houston Methodist Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical College. He is also adjunct Professor of Urology at the Medical University of Vienna in Austria.

Dr. Palapattu’s clinical interest is in the evaluation and management of men with prostate and kidney cancer. As a surgeon-scientist, he currently maintains a prostate cancer translational lab focusing on understanding and targeting molecular drivers of aggressive disease. His work has received funding from the NIH/NCI, Department of Defense and the Prostate Cancer Foundation, among others.

U-M’s Department of Urology is consistently recognized as one of the top urology programs and is currently ranked fifth in the nation by U.S. News and World Report, with 48 faculty members and 26 trainees. “It is indeed an honor and privilege to serve as Chair of the Department of Urology at the University of Michigan. For close to 100 years, Urology at Michigan has been a leader in state of the art clinical care, groundbreaking research and innovative medical education,” says Palapattu.

“My predecessor, Dr. David Bloom, has done a tremendous job in building an outstanding team that is uniquely collaborative, collegial and impactful. I enthusiastically look forward to working with our faculty, trainees and staff to continue to deliver outstanding care to our patients and work tirelessly to achieve our shared vision: a world free of suffering from urologic disease—forever.”