Meet the DCCPS New and Early Stage R01 Investigators

My interest in serving this population began in college, when a lightbulb went off during an introductory psychology class. I had planned to pursue a career in medicine but was much more interested in the opportunity to help patients and families cope and manage stressors. My personal and professional experiences with cancer have fueled my passion to provide high-quality, accessible psychosocial care to families as they navigate what is likely one of the worst times of their lives.

I remember when I first learned that in Hodgkin lymphoma, unlike almost any other malignancy, the malignant tumor cells comprise less than 0.1% of the total tumor volume, and the remainder of the tumor bulk are the patient's dendritic cells, macrophages, T cells and B cells. This inspired my desire to understand how lymphoma manipulates the immune system for its own growth and survival, and to address this in a myriad of ways both at the bench and at the beside.

Every week in clinic I see the struggles that patients with breast cancer face trying to tolerate their life-saving cancer medications. This has inspired me to understand what underlies the difficulties with medication compliance, and to explore interventions to reduce these challenges. I strive to help people keep taking their medications while maintaining their quality of life.

When I witnessed patients dying from curable cancers, I realized I wanted to be part of the solution. I sought to care for patients clinically and contribute more broadly through my commitment to impactful research.

My fascination with neurodevelopment began as I observed disruption in emerging skills at the time of treatment and examined the individual differences in skill trajectories years later. My mission is to identify contributors to these individual differences within a bio-psycho-socio-cultural context. These methods will be used to inform precision medicine by personalizing chemoradiation treatment and prophylactic interventions to prevent, mitigate, and manage cognitive impairment in medulloblastoma.

An important moment for my research interests was realizing the importance of co-creating health care delivery interventions with clinical and operational leaders while employing rigorous research methods such as prospective randomization in pragmatic trials. This process has identified delivery programs with high potential to improve outcomes while also creating generalizable knowledge that can advance the science of population-based cancer screening.

A few years ago I became aware of research by my colleagues and others that found that the psychological well-being of cancer survivors and their supportive partners is related, and actually tightly interconnected. I was wowed; from that moment on, I wanted to study the benefits of compassion meditation for breast cancer survivors and their partners.

My "ah-ha" moment came when my postdoctoral mentor articulated to me that the advancement of science is helped, not hindered, by people who work at the intersections, and encouraged me to embrace my identity as a boundary spanner, not try to fit neatly into one field or another. This advice continues to drive my program of research today.

My commitment to advancing etiologic and translational research on lung cancer is driven by the loss of my father to the disease, now over 30 years ago, and the recognition that lung cancer continues to touch the lives of many, as it remains the leading cause of cancer mortality.

I am driven to link genes to associated functions in liver diseases and I hope to make discoveries that make positive impacts on patients.

During the first year of my PhD study, I had hands-on experience analyzing large-scale Genome-Wide Association Study data. I quickly decided that I would pursue this area of genetic epidemiology as the direction of my scientific career.