Jay K Harness, MD

JAY K. HARNESS, MD, FACS, a past president of The American Society of Breast Surgeons and Breast Surgery International, works full time in private practice as a breast surgeon in Orange, California. He currently serves as a clinical professor of surgery at University of California, Irvine. For twenty-eight years, Dr. Harness worked in full-time academic general surgery at institutions such as the University of Michigan, Tufts University, the University of California, Davis, and the University...See more

JAY K. HARNESS, MD, FACS, a past president of The American Society of Breast Surgeons and Breast Surgery International, works full time in private practice as a breast surgeon in Orange, California. He currently serves as a clinical professor of surgery at University of California, Irvine. For twenty-eight years, Dr. Harness worked in full-time academic general surgery at institutions such as the University of Michigan, Tufts University, the University of California, Davis, and the University of California, San Francisco. For the past three decades, Dr. Harness has advocated for a multidisciplinary team approach to the treatment of breast cancer. He served as the founding medical director of the University of Michigan's Breast Care Center (BCC) in 1985. The Michigan BCC became one the first academic multidisciplinary breast cancer programs in the United States. His first book, Breast Cancer: Collaborative Management, promoted multidisciplinary care. Subsequently, Dr. Harness established and directed similar breast cancer programs in Boston and Orange, California. In 2011 Dr. Harness cofounded Breast Cancer Answers (breastcanceranswers.com), a website designed for patients and their families. This site introduced the first social media program for breast cancer patients, and it provides information from breast cancer experts that can be accessed anonymously and for free. Visitors will find a searchable library of informative videos with answers to questions raised by women with breast cancer. See less