WCLC 2021 EDUCATION AWARDS

Radiologist. Department of Radiology. Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires. Argentina

Luca Cantini, MD, is a medical oncologist and PhD Candidate at Università Politecnica delle Marche (UNIVPM) actively involved in translational research in Immuno-Oncology with a special focus on thoracic cancers. He has recently been awarded with the 2021 ESMO Translational Research Fellowship, to carry on (during the first months of 2021) a project titled “ENSURE study - dENdritic cell therapy combined with SURgEry in mesothelioma” (Host Institute: Department of Pulmonary Diseases, Erasmus MC Cancer Center, Rotterdam (NL)). As a clinical scientist, his research projects mainly look at understand why, despite last advances in the field of passive and active immunotherapy, still some cancer patients seem not to benefit from it. His goal is to better elucidate the immunotherapy rationale, investigate potential combinations, while facing new methodological challenges in this field. In previous years, he has been awarded with the ESO Grant for participating in the “18th ESO/ESMO Masterclass in Clinical Oncology” and the ESMO Grant for participating in the “Translational Research Unit Visit”.

Dr. Chan completed his MD/PhD at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he studied computational biology and developed new methods to model the topology of viral evolution and identify recurrent FGFR-TACC fusions in glioblastoma multiforme. He is currently a medical oncology and postdoctoral research fellow at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center where he aims to leverage single-cell technologies to understand how neuroendocrine lineage plasticity in lung and prostate cancer mediates metastasis and therapeutic resistance, and how the tumor microenvironment can impact this tumor-intrinsic process.

Postgraduate， Tongji University

Dr. Desai is a first-year hematology-oncology fellow at Mayo Clinic, Rochester. He holds a master’s degree in public health from the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston and a certification in Health Professions Education from University of Connecticut. He also serves as a secretary for the Minnesota State Medical Association Resident and Fellow Section. Dr. Desai is the recipient of a 2021 Young Investigator Award from Conquer Cancer, the ASCO Foundation. He is the new social media editor for JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics (@ASCO_pubs) and a member of the ASCO Trainee and Early Career Council. His professional interests include evidence base in oncology, clinical trials, drug development, cancer care quality, and health care delivery. He is also one of the founding members of the grassroots consortium focusing on COVID-19 in patients with cancer now known as the COVID19 and Cancer Consortium (CCC19; @COVID19nCCC). Follow him on Twitter @ADesaiMD. Disclosure.

Mark is a 3rd year medical student at the University Chicago Loyola Stritch School of Medicine. He earned his Bachelor's in Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior at the University of California, Davis in 2016.

Samuel A. Kareff is the Chief Resident of the Michael Adams Clinical Educator (MACE) track while completing his final year of residency in internal medicine at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital. He will be entering his Hematology/Oncology fellowship in July 2021 at the University of Miami Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center/Jackson Memorial Hospital. In addition to thoracic oncology, he is interested in health practice, policy, research, and education.

Arvind Kumar is a medical student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai. His research focus is lung cancer surgery for non-small-cell lung cancer, and specific topics of interest include minimally invasive surgery, lung cancer TNM staging, and treatment of stage IVa NSCLC.

I am a PGY-3 resident in radiation oncology at City of Hope. I am excited to attend the IASLC 2021 WCLC!

Dr. Jiaqing Liu has focused his scientific interest in the field of Cancer Immunotherapy since his university training. He obtained an M.D. degree in the Zhongshan School of Medicine of Sun Yat-sen University. In 2021, he obtained a grant supported by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (BX2021390). Up to now, he has published 11 papers in international peer-reviewed journals.

Dr. Pathak is an assistant clinical professor in the section of thoracic oncology, department of medical oncology and therapeutics research, at City of Hope. His research is focused on immune-related adverse events and healthcare delivery.

Dr. Biagio Ricciuti is a staff scientist at the Lowe Center for Thoracic Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He received his MD degree magna cum laude from the University of Perugia (Italy). He completed his residency and fellowship in Medical Oncology at the Santa Maria della Misericordia Hospital in Perugia, before joining the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in 2018 as research fellow. His clinical and translational research focus is on identifying biomarkers of response and resistance to immunotherapies in lung cancer. He authored 90 publications in international peer-reviewed journals, including first author original research articles in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Clinical Cancer Research, and Annals of Oncology. He is a recipient of the 2020 Young Investigator Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), the 2020 Fellowship Award from the International Association for the Society of Lung Cancer (IASLC), and the 2021 AstraZeneca Immunotherapy in Lung Cancer Clinical Fellowship from the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC).

Dr. Karin Schelch is an experienced molecular biologist with a strong background in translational mesothelioma research. Dr. Schelch studied molecular biology and toxicology and holds a PhD in molecular oncology from the Medical University of Vienna, Austria. Her PhD work identified fibroblast growth factors as novel theapeutic targets in mesothelioma. In 2015, Dr. Schelch joined the team of Prof. Nico van Zandwijk and Dr. Glen Reid at the Asbestos Diseases Research Institute in Sydney, Australia, as a postdoctoral research fellow, where she primarily focused on the role of microRNAs and the oncoprotein YB-1 in mesothelioma. In 2018, Dr Schelch was awarded a prestigeous Hertha-Firnberg fellowship for postdocs from the Austrian Science Fund and moved back to Vienna to continue her research on YB-1 in mesothelioma. Recently, she became the labhead of the Translational Thoracic Oncology Lab at the Department of Thoracic Surgery of the Medical University of Vienna, where she now focuses on the characterization of small cell lung cancer to establish novel treatment approaches.

Ilyas Yambayev, MD Pathology resident at Boston University Medical Center

Nikhil is a radiation oncology resident (PGY3) at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University and medical degree from Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. He is interested in studying ways to reduce treatment-related toxicities and better defining the role of proton therapy.

Oncology resident of the Italian hospital. Internal Medicine specialist. Doctor of the emergency center. Professor at the University of Buenos Aires.

3rd year medical student in University of Indonesia

Dr Aruna Nambirajan is an early career researcher from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India. Trained as a pathologist in the same institute, she has a keen interest in all facets of pulmonary pathology, particularly in analysing novel molecular methods in the diagnosis and prognostication of lung cancer. She has an excellent academic and research record with many awards, and >65 peer reviewed publications and book chapters. She is actively involved in funded research projects in lung cancer. She received this award in the IASLC WCLC 2021 conference for her work on the complementary utility of combined ALK/ROS1 FISH with immunohistochemistry for ALK/ ROS1 rearrangement testing in lung cancer (Abstract No. 904). This work has important implications for routine predictive biomarker testing algorithms in daily lung cancer reporting.

Medical oncologist, PhD candidate at Guangdong Lung Cancer Institute, China, Focus on central nervous system metastases of lung cancer.