November 30, 2018
Congratulations to the recipients of The University of Kansas Cancer Center’s 2018 Pilot and Travel Awards! Each year, winners are recognized for their research contributions to the cancer center and are announced at its annual Research Symposium.
Pilot Project Award
Pilot project award recipients are recognized for novel research that shows great promise in their field. This year’s winners were:
- Jill Peltzer - "Breast Cancer Fatigue & Mitochodrial Gene Expression in Black & White Women"
- Natabhona Mabachi - “Adapting HITSystem to support cervical cancer screening and treatment in Kenya”
- Fariba Behbod - “Investigating role of immune system in progression of ductal carcinoma in situ”
- Cory Berkland - “Repurposing glatiramer acetate for intratumoral immunotherapy”
- ACS- IRG Award, Yuxia Zhang - “Understanding the role of RNA-bing protein HuR in liver carcinogenesis”
Poster Competitions
Poster competition award recipients receive support to attend conferences and/or scientific meetings.
Student Poster Competition Award Recipients
1st place – Afreen Sayed - “RBM3 increases tumor progression by increasing stemness and metastasis in colon cancer”
2nd place – Richard Meier - “A Bayesian framework for assessing concordance in microbial abundance”
3rd place – Stefan Graw - “pwrEWAS: A computationally efficient tool for comprehensive power estimation for epigenome wide association studies (EWAS)”
Postdoc/Trainee Poster Competition Award Recipients
1st place – Sayem Miah - “Breast Tumor Kinase Mediated Phosphorylation of SMAD4 Regulates TGF-β/SMAD4 Signaling, Chromatin Remodeling and Promotes Cell Invasion”
2nd place – Prasad Dandawate - “Prolactin Receptor, a novel target for Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma”
3rd place - Shariska Petersen - “Geographic distance greater than 50 miles does not impact ovarian cancer survival at a frontier state NCI-designated cancer center”
Junior Faculty/ Clinical Poster Competition Award Recipients
1st place – Lisa Harlan-Williams - “The influence of BRCA1 on the metabolic phenotype of mice”
2nd place – Jeffrey Thompson - “A Curated Cancer Clinical Outcomes Data Base (C3OD) for accelerating patient recruitment in cancer clinical trials”
3rd place – Anup Kasi - “Novel prognostic biomarkers and their association with survival in pancreatic cancers”