Oscar Streeter

Between caring for his patients at the USC/Norris Cancer Center, teaching students and performing his research, you would think that Oscar Streeter would have enough on his plate.

Even so, when Streeter noticed that minorities tended to be proportionally underrepresented in study populations (a fact that is especially troubling because of the superior care received by patients participating in clinical trials), he decided to do something about it. Streeter joined the Radiation Therapy Oncology Group's special populations committee, which seeks to ensure that clinical trial populations maintain a representative ethnic balance. Streeter likens the committee to "a moral compass."

Streeter, who earned a BS in biology from USC, has also been instrumental in the development and testing of software that helps Norris staff physicians create a computer simulation of a real patient in order to help create a three-dimensional conformal radiation treatment. Such treatment traditionally requires patients to lie still on a hard table for hours. "Now the patient can go home and come back when we've finished the plan," Streeter says.

In 2001, he and two other Keck School of Medicine doctors were named in Black Enterprise's list of Top 100 Black Physicians. But for Streeter, the ultimate payoff is not accolades but the occasional meeting with a patient who beat cancer. Says Streeter, "I recently saw one patient I hadn't seen in a few years. She had pancreatic cancer, with a life expectancy of eight months — so it was especially great to see her eight years out."