Dr. Wallner is passionate about improving the delivery and quality of cancer care for patients, their families, and their care teams. Much of her focus as a cancer care delivery researcher is on identifying gaps in the quality of cancer care and evaluating and implementing interventions to try to improve cancer care. She is also passionate about mentoring the next generation of cancer care delivery scientists. Her research program largely focuses on understanding and improving the coordination and quality of care after primary cancer treatment. Dr. Wallner's approach to this research has been directly influenced by interaction with patients with cancer and their families, and the providers who care for them. Hearing about the multitude of challenges that exist in receiving high-quality survivorship care, and how survivorship care is often not equitable, has led her to investigate gaps in the quality of this care and identify disparities in the coordination and delivery of survivorship care.

Dr. Wallner's personal experience of losing two people close to her to colorectal cancer diagnosed under the age of 40 directly influenced her current project, focused on developing risk-stratified survivorship care pathways for patients diagnosed with early-onset colorectal cancer. As the incidence of colorectal cancer diagnosed in those under the age of 50 continues to increase at an alarming rate, the quality of their survivorship care remains suboptimal. There is a critical need to tailor survivorship care to the individual needs of this patient population, rather than relying on guidelines that were developed for older adults. This study will yield crucial population-based estimates of recurrence risk, surveillance intensity, and survivorship care needs in patients with early-onset colorectal cancer, which will be used to develop stratified survivorship care pathways. The findings from this study have the potential to meaningfully improve the quality of survivorship care for the growing population of patients with early-onset colorectal cancer.