MSKCC in the News: April 25 – May 14

  • Christopher Lima of MSKCC was selected to join the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator Program.
  • Gopa Iyer of MSKCC was awarded the James Family Young Investigator Award for “Identifying Predictors of Response to mTOR-targeted Therapies in Bladder Cancer.”
  • Foundation Medicine and MSKCC announced a partnership that brings together clinical, genomic and computational expertise to advance patient care in hematologic cancers.
  • Scientists from The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and MSKCC published results in the journal Cell Stem Cell of a new model cell system that allows neuroscientists to investigate normal brain development, as well as to identify specific disruptions in biological signals that may contribute to neuropsychiatric diseases.
  • Nature published findings from a large-scale genomic analysis led by researchers at MSKCC and other centers within The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) Research Network that may help diagnose endometrial cancer and lead to new drug development.
  • MSKCC’s Dr. Kenneth Offit is quoted in an NPR article about Angelina Jolie’s decision to have a preventive double mastecomy.

Funding Opportunities For Early Career Researchers

Two recent news stories about science funding highlight current gaps in funding for early career researchers and what is being done to alleviate the problem.

The Office of Science of the Department of Energy announced the names of 61 recipients of funding under the 2013 Early Career Research Program, whose proposals were selected out of a pool of 770 by a peer review process. The program is designed to support the individual research programs of outstanding young scientists working in disciplines supported by the DOE Office of Science, such as Biological and Environmental Science and Nuclear Physics (among others). Although this year’s award recipients have already been named, this is the fourth year of the program, so be on the lookout for the FOA for a shot at the 2014 awards (2013’s FOA was issued in July 2012).

In other news for early career researchers, the chiefs of seven major philanthropic organizations, including the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, have signed a “Call to Action” to support basic scientific research in areas where young scientists are often shut out of other types of funding. Continue reading

Blog Buzz: May 4 – May 10

The White House rolled out an Executive Order and Open Data Policy yesterday, announced in a press release. There are 400,000 data sets from government agencies available, and the memorandum requires agencies to “create information…using machine-readable and open formats”. Visit DATA.gov and check out Under the Hood of the Open Data Engine for more on how you can get started using this new resource.

Over at the Digital Shift, there’s a piece on the Data Curation Profiles Directory, developed at Purdue to track how academic libraries are managing the explosion of research data sets.

From MLA this year, Eric Schnell wrote about the possibility of using the “flipped classroom” model at future conferences in Flipping the MLA Conference, and it is clear in the comments that others were thinking the same thing.  This is an interesting idea for how everyone can get more out of conferences by digesting the material beforehand and discussing it on-site with colleagues.

And finally, some Friday fun from a fellow MSKCC staff member…
https://twitter.com/caitlin_hool/status/332840676771364865