Melissa Hudson, M.D., is a member and director of the Cancer Survivorship Division in the Department of Oncology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. She joined the St. Jude faculty in 1989, and became director of the After Completion of Therapy (ACT) Clinic in 1993.

During her tenure as director, the ACT Clinic evaluation evolved to include a series of focused educational interventions aiming to increase survivor knowledge about cancer and its associated health risks and motivate the practice of health protective behaviors. The ACT Clinic has served as a paradigm of optimal risk-based survivor care, within a research setting, that provides a screening and prevention plan that integrates the cancer experience with health care needs.  The ACT Clinic has also provided a forum for numerous research initiatives evaluating complications after childhood cancer and methods of health promotion. It now monitors more than 8,000 long-term childhood cancer survivors treated at St. Jude.

Dr. Hudson disseminated the St. Jude model of risk-based survivor care through her activities in the Children’s Oncology Group as co-Chair of the COG Long-Term Follow-Up Guidelines for Survivors of Childhood, Adolescent and Young Adult Cancer (2002-2023), and co-chair of the International Late Effects of Childhood Cancer Guideline Harmonization Group (2010-present). She is the Principal Investigator of the St. Jude Lifetime Cohort Study and a member of the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study Executive Committee.  Dr. Hudson has collaborated with CCSS and COG investigators in a variety of outcomes investigations and health promotion initiatives targeting childhood cancer survivors. She has published widely on late health outcomes of childhood, adolescent and young adult pediatric cancer survivors.

Dr. Hudson completed her fellowship in Pediatric Hematology-Oncology at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. She earned her medical degree from the University of Texas Medical School at Houston and her undergraduate degree from Texas A & M University in College Station, Texas.