Announcing our Awardees!

We are thrilled to introduce you to our three travel grant awardees! These early-career researchers had the highest-rated scientific abstracts among our meeting applicants. They also represent the diversity of our attendees. We're excited to support their attendance at the Hormone-Dependent Cancers GRS!

- Daniel Tamae, Ph.D. - Postdoctoral Assoc., University of Pennsylvania - Rajdeep Das, M.D. - Graduate Student, University of Adelaide - Australia - Yinghui Zhang, Ph.D. - Postdoctoral Assoc., University of Leiden - The Netherlands You'll find brief bios of our awardees below, and in the coming weeks they'll tell you a little bit more about their research projects.

Daniel Tamae, Ph.D. - Postdoctoral Assoc., University of Pennsylvania

 

Daniel received his B.S. in Biochemistry from California State University, Los Angeles. He got his first exposure to the cancer research field while working as a lab technician at the Beckman Research Institute at City of Hope, an National Cancer Institute designated Comprehensive Cancer Center in Duarte, CA. During this time, he worked on understanding mechanisms of radiation resistance in breast cancer. He went on to receive his Ph.D. from the City of Hope Graduate School of Biological Sciences under the tutelage of Professor John Termini. His thesis research used biochemistry and analytical chemistry to interrogate a specific DNA adduct that can arise from altered glucose metabolism such as in diabetes and in certain tumors such as that of the breast and the brain , which use glucose as an exclusive energy source. He is currently conducting his post-doctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania with Professor Trevor M. Penning and is focused on improving our understanding of castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC), which claims the vast majority of prostate cancer death. His current research uses analytical chemistry to probe hormone metabolism in CRPC and he has applied his method to two high profile clinical trials and is now using the method to investigate a potential drug target in CRPC. Rajdeep Das, M.D. - Graduate Student, University of Adelaide - Australia

 

I am a trained physician and hold a specialist degree in Clinical Pathology. Currently, I am doing a PhD in Cancer Biology at the University of Adelaide, Australia.

My earliest impression of medicine occurred when I used to accompany my father, an endocrinologist by himself to health camps. The respect that his patients bestowed on him, and his ability to ease suffering, sparked a desire to one day become a physician myself. Further, my traditional family-oriented culture, emphasizing doing good for others, contributed to this decision to pursue a career in the medical field.

It was during my second year of medicine when I developed a small interest in pathology but did not fully realize my interest until I was on surgery (during my third year) and was sent down with a specimen by an attending to observe how the pathologist handles the specimen and what it looked like microscopically. I found that I was much more interested in this aspect of the case than in the surgery itself. Additionally, I was always very interested when microscopic slides were shown in presentations on different diseases and I knew then that I had developed a strong interest in pathology. Therefore, after graduation and working for a year as a rural general practitioner, I entered the Clinical Pathology residency program. It was during that time when I first became interested in cancer research. I knew what I wanted in my career. I wanted intellectual challenge and an investigative role.

I migrated to Australia on the prestigious International Postgraduate Research Scholarship to pursue PhD. The focus of my research is to investigate the role of microRNAs in the development and progression of prostate cancer.

My long term career goal is to serve humanity by practicing as a Clinical Pathologist and simultaneously working in the field of cancer research.

Yinghui Zhang, Ph.D. - Postdoctoral Assoc., University of Leiden - The Netherlands

 

Yinghui Zhang is a research fellow at the University of Leiden. She graduated from Wuhan University in China and came to Leiden University in The Netherlands to pursue her PhD study, starting on how to activate programmed cell death in cancer cells to kill them. With knowing more about the cancer cells that can cleverly resist cell death and attack the body of patient, she has been focusing on breast cancer, the most common cancer in women. In collaboration with her colleagues in cancer research, she is thrilled to understand how breast cancer cells receive survival signaling from the receptor protein kinases on the cell membrane to evade drug killing. She is searching for novel drug targets that can block the cancerous signaling and can re-sensitize breast cancer cells to death. She wants to help stop women suffering from breast cancer.