Predoctoral Awards

The UF Health Cancer Center awards Predoctoral Awards annually to up to six graduate students. These awards are intended to recognize and support outstanding predoctoral candidates who are conducting innovative cancer research.

Description

The award allots a total of $10,000 to the recipient for a one-year period: $8,000 for lab supplies and $2,000 for travel expenses for the student. 

A committee of Cancer Center faculty selects the award winners. Awardees are asked to give a three-minute thesis presentation at the UF Health Cancer Center Research Showcase on Jan. 31, 2024

Please email any questions to Education@cancer.ufl.edu.

Eligibility 

  • Applicants must have passed the Ph.D. qualifying exam within the last 15 months
  • Applicant’s mentor must be a member of the UF Health Cancer Center and hold cancer-focused extramural funding
  • Applicants must be in a UF graduate program with a project clearly focused on cancer

Application 

To apply, applicants are required to submit the following:

  • NIH Fellowship-format biosketch
  • UF graduate school transcript
  • Research Project Title, Ph.D. qualifying exam proposal and qualifying exam chair summary
  • Letter of support from mentor (this may be emailed separately by mentor)
  • Mentor’s NIH biosketch, including research support (this may be emailed separately by mentor)
  • Essay (one page maximum) should cover the following:
    • Summary of how applicant became involved in cancer research as well as future plans
    • Synopsis of applicant’s thesis work
    • Significance, impact and relevance of applicant’s work to cancer 

Predoctoral Awards

Congratulations to our 2022 Predoctoral Awardees!


Diliara Bagautdinova, M.A.

Mentor: Carla Fisher, Ph.D.

Dissertation Title: “Healthy Adult Development in AYA Oncology: Promoting Identity Development by Enhancing Family and Clinician Communication”


Miles Cameron, B.Sc.

Mentor: Andrew Judge, Ph.D.

Dissertation Title: “Identification of Mechanisms and a Novel Therapeutic Intervention to Counter Cancer-associated Cachexia”


Minh-Chau Le, B.S.

Mentor: Hugh Fan, Ph.D.

Dissertation Title: “Microfluidic Platforms for the Detection of Rare Cells in Sarcomas and Triple-Negative Breast Cancer”


Nam Nguyen, Pharm.D.

Mentor: Jatinder Lamba, Ph.D.

Dissertation Title: “CRISPR/Cas9 Screening to Identify Modulators of Chemotherapy Response in Pediatric Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML)”


Sadeem Qdaisat, B.S.

Mentor: Elias Sayour, M.D., Ph.D.

Dissertation Title: “Resetting IFN-I signaling to unlock cancer immunogenicity”


Gregory Takacs, B.S.

Mentor: Jeffrey Harrison, Ph.D.

Dissertation Title: “Investigating mechanisms of CCR2+ myeloid cell-derived immune suppression in glioblastoma”


The 2022 predoctoral awardees at Research Day 2023.

Please email any questions to Education@cancer.ufl.edu.

winners
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