a legacy: dr. shashi lele

On January 1, 2023, Dr. Shashikant “Shashi” Lele began his retirement at the age of 80, stepping down as Chair of the Department of Gynecologic Oncology at Buffalo, New York’s Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center. 

His 50-year career in gynecologic oncology has spanned the world and left a lasting impact on the lives of thousands of patients and colleagues.

mark dellas

Today, Dr. Lele remains with Roswell Park as the International Medical Concierge Program’s Medical Director for International Patients, helping to connect providers and their patients all over the world with clinical expertise, assistance with diagnoses and treatment plans, referrals, and even visas in cases where patients must travel to receive the care they need. The aim of the program is to help increase access to quality care for people who might not live around the corner from a facility that can treat them.

The global impact of Dr. Lele’s work also continues through the Shashikant B. Lele, MD Endowed Fellowship in Gynecologic Oncology. This fellowship program, which Dr. Lele started in 2011, brings international medical professionals who have recently completed obstetrics and gynecology training to Roswell Park for exposure to oncology. 

Fellows are trained in surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy, and after completing the program return to their countries equipped to treat patients facing cancer diagnoses. In parts of the world where access to specialized gynecologic cancer treatment is rare, the expertise a doctor brings home with them is critical to improving patient outcomes.

Both the international patient program and the endowed fellowship are capstones of Dr. Lele’s career, representing his achievement of a lifelong personal and professional goal–to make high quality, effective care accessible to women with gynecologic cancers around the world.

This ambitious goal was born out of Dr. Lele’s exposure to patients in India, where he was born and raised and where he completed his medical training. 

Shashi, who grew up in Bombay–now Mumbai–has many early memories of visits to his mother’s hometown, a village some 300 miles from the city. On these visits as a teenager, he observed the local doctor, a neighbor of his mother’s family, treating patients day in and day out who had traveled long distances for care. 

“It was a very rural area, and people would come in bullock carts. There would be 50 carts lined up outside his house and he would see the patients from eight in the morning to ten at night,” Dr. Lele says. “He was my first inspiration. I felt that I should become a doctor like him in order to help people.”

After completing high school, Shashi became the first in his family to go on to medical school. Once there, he discovered a particular passion for women’s health care in his gynecology coursework, and with the guidance of a professor who saw promise in him he became one of three members of his class to specialize in obstetrics and gynecology during residency. 

As a young OB-GYN in 1960s Bombay, Dr. Lele found himself overwhelmed by the frequency with which patients who came to his clinic suffering with cervical cancer were unable to access the specialized care they needed.

“There was just one cancer hospital in Bombay, and there were no specialists in gynecologic cancers,” Dr. Lele says. “So our patients with cancer were not getting the right care. Seeing them and being able to do nothing made me think I should focus on oncology.”

But at the time, there weren’t yet residency or fellowship programs in India that offered the training Dr. Lele sought–so he began looking elsewhere, and set his sights on the United States.

In 1970, Shashi and his wife Amol–whom he had met during medical school, also an OB-GYN–moved to Cleveland, Ohio. 

Though he had already completed his medical education in India, in order to meet the requirements for medical practice in the United States he completed a second OB-GYN residency at Cleveland’s Mount Sinai Hospital before moving to Buffalo to pursue, finally, his fellowship in gynecologic oncology at Roswell Park in 1974.

After he completed his fellowship, Dr. Lele, now equipped with the skills he had crossed the world to learn, stayed with Roswell Park for another decade before leaving in 1988 to practice at various Buffalo hospitals. 

Here, he built strong relationships with hundreds of patients and a glowing reputation among referring gynecologists around Buffalo and Western New York. It was this reputation that led Roswell Park in 1998, under new leadership, to approach Dr. Lele about taking charge of the Department of Gynecologic Oncology. 

With Dr. Lele at its head, the department grew and thrived. Recognizing that medicine should be paired with science at a major cancer center, he quickly moved to build a research arm within the department to complement his clinical work. He recruited accomplished clinicians and researchers, maintained his relationships with Western New York’s OB-GYN community, taught fellows who went on to practice in Buffalo and beyond, and eventually began his endowed fellowship and supported the development of Roswell Park’s International Medical Concierge Program. 

He prioritized sustainability throughout his tenure, ensuring that whatever he accomplished for his department could be carried on by future generations of leadership. 

Most of all, Dr. Lele has never wavered in his dedication to his patients.

“Women’s care is what motivated me,” he says. “There are patients who, even after retiring, I miss, because they’re the ones who kept me going.”

He’s stayed true to his inspiration, always seeking first and foremost–like the local doctor in his mother’s home village–to help people. 

Over his 50-year career, incredible strides have been made, here in the United States, in India, and around the world, to increase prevention of gynecologic cancers and access to care for patients with cancer diagnoses. This is thanks to scientific research, to government and non-profit programs providing public health resources and funding, and, of course, to doctors like Shashi Lele who have dedicated their lives to providing compassionate, effective care.

These are Dr. Lele’s legacy: the Department of Gynecologic Oncology and the Lele Endowed Fellowship at Buffalo’s Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center; the thousands of patients whose lives he has touched; and the unquantifiable impact of his tireless work to bring training in the field of gynecologic oncology to all corners of the world. 

“You do your share,” Dr. Lele says of what he has accomplished. “Of course you can’t help everybody, but at least that’s your goal, and that’s where your heart is. Everyone should get the right care, and that’s my main goal–to help those women who might be underserved or not served otherwise.”