iASLC FELLOWSHIP AND YOUNG INVESTIGATOR PROGRAMS

The International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer is proud to announce the annual IASLC Fellowship and Young Investigators Programs.

 

Applications are now requested for the 2013 – 2014 Fellowship and Young Investigator award cycle. Overall, there will be a minimum of three awards of $40,000 per year, each for a duration of two years (total $80,000 per grant), with at least one recipient from each region (North America, Europe and Rest of the World) funded. The Prevent Cancer Foundation (PCF) will jointly sponsor awards focused on lung cancer prevention and translational research, supported through educational grants.

 

Application forms can be found on the Fellowship Guidelines Page.

 

For information in other languages, please download the Announcement in Spanish, Chinese or Japanese.

 

fellowship recipients

The 2013 recipients are:

 

Peter Choi, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, Massachusetts 

 

Daniela Morales-Espinosa, Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain

 

Narenda Wajapeyee, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 

 

Stories on the fellows are below:  

 

Daniela Morales-Espinosa Catalan Institute of Oncology Barcelona, Spain

Daniela Morales-Espinosa likes to live life to the fullest. The medical oncologists went ski diving in March on behalf of a friend who lost her battle with cancer.

 

“I promised her I would do it someday,” Morales-Espinosa says. “March would have been her 24^th  

birthday; she was on my mind all the time.”

 

Dr. Morales-Espinosa says she likes to have a lust for life. She has loved medicine since she was young, graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 2005 with her degree in medicine and went onto several residency and post graduate programs. Now, she is awarded a 2013 International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) Fellowship Award.

 

Morales-Espinosa and two other candidates were awarded research funding for two years after competing with a global pool of applicants. Applications were evaluated by an international scientific review panel for their merit, innovation and potential impact on the management of lung cancer. The goal for IASLC is to reward scientific excellence and to encourage innovative research in lung cancer prevention and translational medicine worldwide.

 

Morales-Espinosa plans to use the grant to study with Dr. Rafael Rosell at the Catalan Institute of Oncology in Barcelona, Spain. She worked in Dr. Rosell’s Translational Research Laboratory in 2012. She’ll return to study the molecular pathways involved in the development of lung cancer.

 

“We propose to study the re-replication pathway, the mechanism by which cells lose control of one of the most regulated systems of the cell, such as replication, where the same DNA fragment ‘re-replicates’ several times during the same cellular division process, giving rise to genetic and chromosomic alternations,” she says.   

 

Specifically, she’ll study three different oncogenic addiction cell line models in order to investigate the re-replication pathway and its involvement in growth dependency and inhibition by use of specific TKIs with/without CHEK1, CHEK2, CHEK1/CHEK2 and NADD8 inhibitors in three different scenarios (mtEGFR, mtKRAS, FGFR2 amplifaction) using 11 cell lines with the corresponding mutation profiles.

 

Dr. Rosell says highly skilled in laboratory techniques and is an intelligent, hard-working person.

 

“She has a bright future as an outstanding investigator and it is my pleasure to accept her for a period of two years in our facilities so she can further her knowledge about the latest advances in clinical practice as regards to personalized lung cancer therapies,” Rosell says.

 

Morales-Espinosa says she’s grateful for the opportunity.

 

“I would like to thank them very much,” she says. “This opportunity is really important for junior oncologists. Of course, I will not let them down for choosing me.” 

 

Peter Choi Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Boston, Massachusetts

 

Peter Choi graduated in 2002 with a degree in biology from Cornell University. But it wasn’t until he worked as a lab technician that he decided to become a scientist.

 

“I got a real picture of what research was all about,” Choi says. “It helped me figure out what I wanted to do and I really fell in love with the work.”

 

Choi pursued a Ph.D. in Immunology from Stanford University and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. And, he was just named a recipient of the 2013 International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) Fellowship Award.

 

Choi and two other candidates were awarded research funding for two years after competing with a global pool of applicants. Applications were evaluated by an international scientific review panel for their merit, innovation and potential impact on the management of lung cancer. The goal for IASLC is to reward scientific excellence and to encourage innovative research in lung cancer prevention and translational medicine worldwide.

 

Choi plans to stay at Dana-Farber to study RBM 10, a recently identified frequently mutated gene in lung adenocarcinoma.

 

“We hypothesize that RBM10 is a novel tumor suppressor gene, and using a variety of detailed approaches, we will investigate the function role of RBM10 in lung cancer, as well as potential interactions between RBM10 and established oncogenes, such as KRAS and EGFR,” Choi says.

 

Choi will work under Dr. Matthew Meyerson, a professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Center for Cancer Genome Discovery at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

 

Dr. Meyerson says his laboratory is an ideal environment for such research and he’s confident Choi will excel in the integrative environment.

 

“He is an excellent candidate for this project given his familiarity with cancer biology and expertise with conducting studies in both cellular and animal models,” Meyerson says.

 

“I was really surprised and very excited to receive this award,” Choi says. “I hope this project will shed some light on how and why this gene is involved in lung cancer.”