Funding Opportunities

Submission Deadline: Closed

  • RFA Announced: June 20, 2024
  • Notification of Selection: October 28, 2024
  • Funding Period: July 1, 2025 - June 30, 2026

SCI Fellowship Awards

Woman working in lab

As an NCI Designated Comprehensive Cancer Center, the Stanford Cancer Institute (SCI)’s mission is to translate Stanford discoveries into individualized cancer care and prevention. In keeping with its important goal of educating and empowering the next generation of cancer researchers, the SCI offers funding to cancer research fellows at Stanford University.
 
The SCI seeks to increase the number of clinical, laboratory, and population researchers, who are carrying out cancer research with applicability to the basic biology, prevention, diagnosis or treatment of cancer, or to the quality of life of cancer patients. This critical source of funding enables trainees to achieve faculty positions and obtain career development awards.  

Evaluation Criteria


The most important criteria for the fellowship awards are that applicants:

  • Have clear evidence of intent to pursue an academic career (prior research experience is a plus).
  • Have a commitment to apply during the 2025 academic year for outside support from foundations, the NIH, or other sources. If outside support is obtained for the 2025 academic year while the application is reviewed and approved, it will be used to offset the SCI funds awarded.


Eligibility


The RFA is open to individuals who are completing their clinical or post-doctoral training and are pursuing clinical, laboratory, or population-based research projects with direct cancer relevance at Stanford University. These individuals are in the final year of their residency or postdoc planning to look for faculty positions in the next year.

2025 Awardees

James C. Dickerson

James Dickerson, MD, MS

James C. Dickerson, MD, MS, is an instructor in the Department of Medicine (Oncology) at the Stanford School of Medicine. Dickerson graduated magna cum laude from the University of Mississippi Medical Center and completed his internship and residency at Stanford, where he currently works as an oncologist specializing in breast cancer. Dickerson's group studies how health policy can improve health equity and eliminate cancer disparities both in the US and abroad. His research goals are to develop financially-sustainable breast cancer care programs, analyze large databases to identify health policies that can improve equity, and conduct clinical research to discover the most effective ways to deliver high-quality care. He hopes to obtain a tenure-track faculty position at a research institution to continue these studies. His proposal seeks to examine barriers to genetic testing for cancer risk in marginalized communities, and potential AI-based solutions to overcoming these barriers.

Ruwan Gunaratne

Ruwan Gunaratne, MD, PhD

Ruwan Gunaratne, MD, PhD, is a clinical postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Tian Zhang's lab at the Department of Medicine (Hematology), at the Stanford School of Medicine. Gunaratne received a PhD in pharmacology and an MD from Duke University, and recently completed his residency at Stanford. For his PhD he developed therapeutics to control coagulation, inflammation and cancer metastasis. His goal is to pursue an academic career focused on improving molecular diagnostics and therapeutics for myeloid malignancies. His current research is focused on the detection of residual disease - cancer cells that survive treatment - in acute myeloid leukemia (AML), and on understanding the cancer's evolution and the development of therapeutic resistance. For his fellowship project he will develop a non-invasive liquid biopsy (a blood test) to detect and characterize residual disease in AML.

Matthew B. McCarra

Matthew McCarra, MD

Matthew B. McCarra, MD, is an instructor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care, at the Stanford University School of Medicine. McCarra completed his medical training at the University of Minnesota Medical School and his residency at the University of California, San Diego. He went on to pursue a fellowship and postdoctoral training at Stanford, developing expertise in lung stem cells and telomerase biology. His long-term career goal is to become a faculty member at a leading academic institution and to lead an independent research program that integrates clinical insights with cutting-edge basic science in lung and cancer biology. More specifically, he hopes to explore how telomere biology intersects with lung cell function in the context of lung cancer, and to translate fundamental discoveries into targeted therapies that improve outcomes for patients with lung cancer.

Julia Ransohoff

Julia Ransohoff, MD

Julia Ransohoff, MD, is a senior postdoctoral clinical fellow in oncology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, seeking to pursue a career as a physician-scientist. Ransohoff completed her medical training at Stanford University, where she also conducted research with both Dr. Paul Khavari (cell biology) and Dr. Nigam Shah (biomedical informatics). As a fellow working in Dr. Ash Alizadeh's lab, Ransohoff's research focuses on developing and applying quantitative molecular methods to detect breast cancer disease that remains after treatment (residual disease). She is developing a personalized test for residual disease, with an ultimate goal of improving treatment and prognosis for patients. She is hoping to pursue an academic career that utilizes her multidisciplinary background in basic cell biology, computational science, epidemiology, and genomics to change how we monitor and treat disease.

Prior Awardees

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Pamela Basto, MD, PhD

Pamela Basto, MD, PhD, is a physician-scientist and fellow in Dr. Edgar Engleman’s laboratory at the Department of Pathology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. She is interested in understanding how tumor cells evolve to evade the immune system, and how cell therapy may be used to target them. As a graduate student at Harvard/MIT Dr. Basto worked at the intersection of immunology and chemical engineering to develop next generation nanoparticle vaccines, work that has been patented and translated into clinical trials. Subsequently, in medical school at Stanford, she investigated approaches to strengthen endogenous and exogenous immune responses against solid tumor metastases. Dr. Basto’s career goal is to pursue a career as a physician scientist, specializing in gastrointestinal oncology and researching immunotherapies and new treatment options for patients with advanced malignancies.

hebert

Jess D. Hebert, PhD

Jess D. Hebert, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Monte Winslow’s laboratory in the Department of Genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Hebert is interested in understanding how tumor genotype regulates metastasis, the process responsible for the overwhelming majority of cancer deaths. During his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Dr. Hebert studied how cancer cells metastasize to different organs by modifying the extracellular matrix. At Stanford he has developed and employed novel CRISPR-based approaches to test the metastatic ability of lung adenocarcinoma tumors with diverse genetic alterations. Dr. Hebert’s goal is to become an independent investigator working to deconvolute the complex genetic factors that control lung cancer metastasis. This work will help to predict metastasis before it occurs and lead to the development of therapies to prevent it.

Masashi Miyauchi, MD, PhD

Masashi Miyauchi, MD, PhD, is a physician-scientist specializing in hematology, oncology, immunology, and stem cell biology, with a decade of clinical experience in hematology and oncology. His career journey has combined both clinical and research training, and his ultimate goal is to pursue an independent academic career. In his PhD research at the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Medicine, Dr. Miyauchi specialized in disease modeling of cancer stem cells, employing patient-specific induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). This work notably included scalable ex vivo manufacturing of human neutrophils. In 2019 he embarked on postdoctoral studies in Hiro Nakauchi’s laboratory in the Department of Genetics at the Stanford University School of Medicine. In his postdoctoral research Dr. Miyauchi is developing a stable hematopoietic stem cell expansion system in humans. Specifically, his proposal is focused on deriving macrophages for use in cancer immunotherapies.

eunji choi

Eunji Choi, PhD

Eunji Choi, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Summer Han’s laboratory in the Quantitative Sciences Unit at Stanford University School of Medicine. As a cancer epidemiologist with diverse training in economics, health policy evaluation, and statistics, Dr. Choi’s ultimate career goal is getting a faculty position at a research-intensive cancer institution. She first became interested in microeconomic analysis and economic policy as an undergraduate. Dr. Choi pursued her PhD in public health at the National Cancer Center of South Korea, where she was able to use her economic policy evaluation skills to assess cancer policy performance and develop fundamental epidemiologic methods and national-level big data analysis. Since coming to Stanford as a postdoctoral scholar in Feb 2020, Dr. Choi has led research in various aspects of managing second primary lung cancer among lung cancer survivors and has taken full advantage of the methodologically rigorous environment at Dr. Han’s laboratory. To become an independent cancer researcher, Dr. Choi is dedicated to acquiring innovative research skills and obtaining funds.

N Juul

Nicholas H. Juul, MD

Nicholas H. Juul, MD, is a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Tushar Desai’s laboratory in the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Juul’s research is focused on using “’omics” and translational assays of primary human tissue to examine mechanisms of lung tumor growth. He has made novel and exciting observations surrounding how the cell of origin of cancer impacts the behavior of the resulting tumor, developing a model of lepidic lung adenocarcinoma in the mouse and discovering evidence that demonstrates the clinical relevance of this model in human lung adenocarcinoma. Dr. Juul has discovered that the Kras and Braf oncogenes can cause a terminally differentiated cell to take on the phenotype of its stem cell en route to tumorigenesis. His observations regarding Wnt in both this murine model and in spheroid assays of primary lung adenocarcinoma have established exciting avenues for further research into the role of Wnt signaling in tumor biology.

 

Shannon White

Shannon M. White, PhD

Shannon M. White, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Michael Snyder’s laboratory in the Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. White received her PhD in Tumor Biology from Georgetown University, where she gained extensive experience in molecular signaling, cancer biology, and epigenetics. Dr. White has a passion for studying epigenetic mechanisms of gene regulation in cancer. Throughout her research career in cancer biology, she has trained in a spectrum of disciplines ranging from protein signaling to metabolomics to epigenetics and led both mechanistic and computational-driven projects. Dr. White aspires to become an independent investigator and wants to focus on using 3D cultures of tumor samples to identify the myriad of diverse molecular mechanisms that drive drug resistance and cancer progression and investigate new therapeutic strategies based on these findings.