The Mark Foundation is pleased to announce the recipients of this year’s Momentum Fellowship awards. These Fellowships provide support to promising junior investigators, enabling them to reach the next level in their careers. All Fellows are nominated by members of the Foundation’s Scientific Advisory Committee and are funded for the duration of one year.
The recipients of the 2021 Momentum Fellowship Awards are:
- Shin Ngiow, PhD, The University of Pennsylvania
- Dr. Ngiow is working to understand the cellular and molecular cooperativity of Lag3 and PD1 signaling in regulating the induction and maintenance of CD8 T cell exhaustion.
- Katherine Miller, PhD, The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital
- Dr. Miller is examining the relationship between the tumor immune microenvironment and response to treatment in pediatric brain cancers.
- Christian Marinaccio, PhD, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
- Dr. Marinaccio is investigating fundamental differences between leukemogenic potential of adult and neonatal hematopoietic stem cells.
- Kriti Bahl, PhD, University of California, San Francisco
- Dr. Bahl is investigating how the RasGRP1-mTORC1 pathway leads to an altered metabolic state in naïve T cells and how it functions in leukemia and other cancer types.
- Minjung Kim, PhD, The University of Maryland
- Dr. Kim is researching the role of SIX1-GATA1-DACH1 protein-protein interactions in blood cancers.
- Pablo Sánchez Vela, MD, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
- Dr. Sánchez Vela is studying clonal hematopoiesis in the immune cells from solid tumors to identify the key genomic elements driving anti-tumoral responses.
- Hannah Kinoshita, MD, Children’s National Hospital
- Dr. Kinoshita is evaluating the immunobiology of multi-antigen specific T-cell therapy infused to patients to reduce the two most common causes of morbidity and mortality following stem cell transplant—cancer relapse and infection.
- James Papatzimas, PhD, University of California, Berkeley
- Dr. Papatzimas is developing next-generation chemical biology approaches for drug discovery using induced proximity-based therapeutic paradigms in the hopes that these modalities will lead to novel cancer therapies against undruggable protein targets.
