R. Dirk Noyes, MD, co-director of Huntsman Cancer Institute’s Multidisciplinary Melanoma Clinic, is a practicing surgical oncologist at Huntsman Cancer Institute and Intermountain Health Care and clinical professor of surgery at the University of Utah School of Medicine.

He is involved in several large multicenter clinical research trials in melanoma and breast cancer involving sentinel lymph node technology. He has placed 560 patients on these trials in the past 10 years and has led the nation in accrual to the Sunbelt Melanoma trial, NSABP B-32 trial, and presently the MSLT II trial in melanoma. This trial compares a less-invasive ultrasound follow-up protocol to the current standard of immediate lymph node removal in melanoma patients with very early spread to lymph nodes.

Noyes received his medical degree from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. He completed his surgical residency at the University of Utah, and a surgical oncology fellowship at the University of Texas, M.D. Anderson Hospital and Tumor Institute. He joined the University of Utah School of Medicine faculty in 1980.

He has served on the Commission on Cancer, which directs national cancer policy, and is a member of the Melanoma Disease Site Committee for the American College of Surgeons Oncology Group. He was appointed a national trainer for sentinel lymph node technology in breast cancer under the auspices of the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project (NSABP) and the National Cancer Institute. During his career, he has traveled and taught extensively, serving medical humanitarian missions or as a visiting professor at universities in the Netherlands, Russia, Ghana, Kenya, Austria, Indonesia, the Philippines, Micronesia, and Japan. He joined Huntsman Cancer Institute in 1999.