NCI Director's Innovation Awards

Hye Kyung Kim, Ludmila Prokunina-Olsson, Sharon Savage, and Rose Yang are each shown receiving their awards from John Niederhuber.

In January, NCI Director John E. Niederhuber, M.D., presented the 2009 NCI Director’s Intramural Innovation Awards at the 13th Annual NCI Intramural Scientific Retreat in Bethesda.

Designed to support the development of highly innovative approaches and technologies aimed at significant cancer-related problems, the awards offer one-time research funding at two levels: Principal Investigator (PI) Awards for tenure-track investigators or those tenured within the past five years and Career Development Awards for postdoctoral fellows, staff scientists, staff clinicians, or senior scientists. Funds are to be used during the current fiscal year.

Four DCEG investigators received PI Awards: Christian C. Abnet, Ph.D., M.P.H., Nutritional Epidemiology Branch, for his proposal, “Search for a virus in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma from high-risk geographic regions”; Ludmila Prokunina-Olsson, Ph.D., Laboratory of Translational Genomics (LTG), for “Detection of allele-specific physical interactions for cancer-associated genetic variants identified by genome-wide association studies”; Sharon A. Savage, M.D., Clinical Genetics Branch, for “Evaluation of sub-telomeric methylation in the pathogenesis of dyskeratosis congenita, a cancer predisposition syndrome”; and Rose Yang, Ph.D., M.P.H., Genetic Epidemiology Branch, for her proposal on “Genomic alterations in radiation-related breast cancer using array-CGH.”

Two DCEG fellows received Career Development Awards: Hye Kyung Kim, M.D. (LTG), for her proposal on “MicroRNA single nucleotide polymorphisms in cancer susceptibility loci 8q24, 11q13, and 5p12,” and Jill Koshiol, Ph.D., Infections and Immunoepidemiology Branch, for “Chronic immune stimulation and lymphomagenesis.”