Moody DeWitt Wharam, Jr.

Wharam, a professor of radiation oncology at Johns Hopkins was born in Washington, D.C. He earned his bachelor’s degree in economics at Harvard University in 1963 then served as a shipboard officer in the U.S. Navy Atlantic Fleet from 1963 to 1965. Wharam earned his medical degree at the University of Virginia in 1969 and served an internship in medicine and pediatrics at Georgetown University Medical Center.

From 1970 to 1973, Wharam held a National Institutes of Health fellowship in radiation therapy at the University of California Medical Center, San Francisco. He remained there on the faculty for a year until joining the faculty at Duke University Medical School.

In 1975, Wharam came to Baltimore to serve in the newly created division of radiation oncology, the second person to be recruited to radiation oncology in the Johns Hopkins Comprehensive Cancer Center. His primary clinical and academic focus was pediatric oncology. 

From 1980 to 1990, he served as the first chairman of the radiation oncology committee of the Pediatric Oncology Group, a National Cancer Institute collaborative group that studied childhood cancers. His role in this premier group made him an active participant in all of the important clinical pediatric cancer research in the United States at the time; this work led to dramatic increases in pediatric cancer survival rates.

In 1990, he was named acting director of the division of radiation oncology, and from 1994 to 2000 served as director of the division. He retired in December of 2016. In 2017, a campaign was initiated to establish the Moody Wharam Professorship.  

Wharam was a member of the International Society of Pediatric Oncology, the Children’s Oncology Group, and a Fellow of both the American College of Radiology and the American Society for Radiation Oncology.