Richard Barakat is an internationally recognized surgeon and clinical investigator who was Chief of the Gynecology Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering from 2001 to 2013 and held the Ronald O. Perelman Chair in Gynecologic Surgery. Dr. Barakat was the lead investigator on several influential research projects at MSK, including a study to compare the benefits of laparoscopic versus standard surgery for patients with endometrial cancer, a study evaluating symptomatic lower-extremity lymphedema in women treated for uterine corpus cancer, and a study testing the efficacy of the Gynecologic Cancer Lymphedema Questionnaire in detecting lower-extremity lymphedema symptoms. Dr. Barakat is author or co-author of more than 340 peer-reviewed articles and numerous textbook chapters and is also an editor of a surgical atlas on gynecologic cancer and of the latest edition of Principles and Practice of Gynecologic Oncology, one of the leading texts in the field.
In addition he served as a member and examiner for the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology and for five years served as Vice Chairman of the Cancer Prevention Committee of the Gynecologic Oncology Group. He was President of the Society of Gynecologic Oncology from 2013 to 2014 and past President of the International Gynecologic Cancer Society (2014-2016). From 2013 -2017, he served as Director of the MSK regional network.
In 2018 Dr. Barakat joined Northwell Health to lead all cancer services and research and serve as professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell.