Dr. West serves as the Founder and Managing Member of OncTalk, LLC.  He is a medical oncologist and Director of Medical Therapeutics for Thoracic Oncology at the Swedish Cancer Institute in Seattle, Washington.

After receiving his undergraduate degree at Princeton University, Dr. West received an M. Phil. in Experimental Biology from Cambridge University on a Fulbright Scholarship before returning to the US to undertake his medical training at Harvard Medical School in Boston, where he earned his MD magna cum laude and conducted research as a Howard Hughes Medical Student Fellow.  He stayed in Boston for his internship and residency in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, then moved to Seattle, Washington for his fellowship in medical oncology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center/University of Washington.   He moved to the Swedish Cancer Institute in Seattle in late 2002, where he directs the medical oncology component of thoracic oncology program.

Dr. West maintains a strong clinical research focus on lung cancer; he currently serves as the principal investigator on several clinical trials of chemotherapy and novel agents and has authored numerous peer-reviewed as well as invited publications.  He has been actively involved with the SWOG Lung Cancer Committee on multiple recent protocols, including several phase II trials and a phase III Intergroup Trial on which he serves as Study Coordinator/Principal Investigator.  In addition to his work in lung cancer, he maintains a significant interest in clinical research in genitourinary oncology.