Duke Awarded NIH Grant to Prep Students for Grad & Medical Programs
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Bernadette Gillis
Senior News Writer/Producer, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion, Duke University School of Medicine
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Filling in the Gaps
When Gabriella Torres was eight, she needed steroids to control asthma and allergies. Then her allergist recommended she take up swimming, and it helped. When she was nine, her younger brother was diagnosed with leukemia. He was treated and recovered. But watching him go through that left an impression.As she got older, Torres had nothing but questions. Why did swimming improve her asthma? Why did her brother get so sick? And why did treatment work for him when it doesn’t for so many other children?Torres was driven to find the answers. In college at New York University, she thought about becoming a pediatric oncologist; she pursued research experiences recommended for students interested in medicine. But then during her junior year an internship at a pharmaceutical company got her interested in pursuing a PhD. “I had never heard of getting a PhD before that,” said Torres, who is from New York City, where her parents are chefs. “But I was able to see that I could use my love of thinking critically about problems long term but still work on a project that relates directly to helping people.”Torres was on the swim team in college and spent much of her free time training. But she got as much research experience as she could, then applied to the integrative immunobiology PhD program at Duke University School of Medicine in 2023.Torres didn’t get in. Her goal of becoming a scientist could have ended there. Instead, she received a call from Johnna Frierson, PhD, associate dean of equity, diversity, and inclusion for the basic sciences at the School of Medicine, asking her if she’d be interested in applying for Duke’s PRIME PREP Program, which provides a year of research experience to recent undergraduates.Torres interviewed for PRIME PREP and got in, then she spent time at Duke conducting research in the lab of Stacy Horner, PhD, associate professor in integrative immunobiology.
The Challenge of Becoming a Physician-Scientist
Five years after joining the faculty at Duke University School of Medicine and Duke Cancer Institute, Tammara Watts, MD, PhD, associate professor of head and neck surgery & communication sciences, is finally outfitting her own lab.In 2019, as a newly recruited surgeon and scientist, she was charged with finding an established researcher who would agree to lend her space to get her research program started. This model is not uncommon at Duke for junior physician-scientists. They are just beginning their clinical practices, and without large amounts of independent federal research funding, starting their own lab at the same time is a heavy lift.Watts found a generous mentor and colleague in Gerard “Gerry” Blobe, MD, PhD, professor of medicine, cell biology, and pharmacology and cancer biology. “I didn’t know a single person on campus, but I called a lot of people. Gerry was gracious enough to take me in,” Watts said. “He gave me a quarter of his lab. That’s where my team works. He gave me use of his common equipment, so I didn’t have to spend any money on that. His team has helped me out in a pinch when my folks have not been able to come in for experiments, and vice versa.”Watts would not be setting up her own lab without a $3.1 million grant that she received in April 2024. Awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), it’s an R01 — an independent investigator grant that funds a specific, mature research project for up to five years.She attributes this success to many factors, including the lab home with Blobe, mentoring and collaboration from other Duke colleagues, and a Duke Cancer Institute (DCI) pilot grant that allowed her to collect preliminary data that she used to show proof of concept in the NIH grant application.Watts’s experiences demonstrate some of the challenges of building a career as a clinician-scientist. Paying for lab space is just one of the hurdles. Putting in the time required is another; It takes years beyond earning an MD-PhD to build a lab. Increasingly, new PhD graduates go into industry, said Blobe, who is also director of education and training at DCI. “The number of postdocs on campus has declined pretty significantly,” he said. That’s a problem because academic scientists, and particularly physician-scientists, who both care for patients and conduct research, drive discovery of new and better treatments.To nurture the next generation of scientists and build a diverse, robust cancer workforce, the National Cancer Institute and DCI have put increased emphasis on education and training. DCI has launched 19 new training initiatives in the last five years, including efforts to engage high school students and undergraduates, all the way to junior faculty. (See “Filling in the Gaps.”)
Related News
Filling in the Gaps
When Gabriella Torres was eight, she needed steroids to control asthma and allergies. Then her allergist recommended she take up swimming, and it helped. When she was nine, her younger brother was diagnosed with leukemia. He was treated and recovered. But watching him go through that left an impression.As she got older, Torres had nothing but questions. Why did swimming improve her asthma? Why did her brother get so sick? And why did treatment work for him when it doesn’t for so many other children?Torres was driven to find the answers. In college at New York University, she thought about becoming a pediatric oncologist; she pursued research experiences recommended for students interested in medicine. But then during her junior year an internship at a pharmaceutical company got her interested in pursuing a PhD. “I had never heard of getting a PhD before that,” said Torres, who is from New York City, where her parents are chefs. “But I was able to see that I could use my love of thinking critically about problems long term but still work on a project that relates directly to helping people.”Torres was on the swim team in college and spent much of her free time training. But she got as much research experience as she could, then applied to the integrative immunobiology PhD program at Duke University School of Medicine in 2023.Torres didn’t get in. Her goal of becoming a scientist could have ended there. Instead, she received a call from Johnna Frierson, PhD, associate dean of equity, diversity, and inclusion for the basic sciences at the School of Medicine, asking her if she’d be interested in applying for Duke’s PRIME PREP Program, which provides a year of research experience to recent undergraduates.Torres interviewed for PRIME PREP and got in, then she spent time at Duke conducting research in the lab of Stacy Horner, PhD, associate professor in integrative immunobiology.
The Challenge of Becoming a Physician-Scientist
Five years after joining the faculty at Duke University School of Medicine and Duke Cancer Institute, Tammara Watts, MD, PhD, associate professor of head and neck surgery & communication sciences, is finally outfitting her own lab.In 2019, as a newly recruited surgeon and scientist, she was charged with finding an established researcher who would agree to lend her space to get her research program started. This model is not uncommon at Duke for junior physician-scientists. They are just beginning their clinical practices, and without large amounts of independent federal research funding, starting their own lab at the same time is a heavy lift.Watts found a generous mentor and colleague in Gerard “Gerry” Blobe, MD, PhD, professor of medicine, cell biology, and pharmacology and cancer biology. “I didn’t know a single person on campus, but I called a lot of people. Gerry was gracious enough to take me in,” Watts said. “He gave me a quarter of his lab. That’s where my team works. He gave me use of his common equipment, so I didn’t have to spend any money on that. His team has helped me out in a pinch when my folks have not been able to come in for experiments, and vice versa.”Watts would not be setting up her own lab without a $3.1 million grant that she received in April 2024. Awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), it’s an R01 — an independent investigator grant that funds a specific, mature research project for up to five years.She attributes this success to many factors, including the lab home with Blobe, mentoring and collaboration from other Duke colleagues, and a Duke Cancer Institute (DCI) pilot grant that allowed her to collect preliminary data that she used to show proof of concept in the NIH grant application.Watts’s experiences demonstrate some of the challenges of building a career as a clinician-scientist. Paying for lab space is just one of the hurdles. Putting in the time required is another; It takes years beyond earning an MD-PhD to build a lab. Increasingly, new PhD graduates go into industry, said Blobe, who is also director of education and training at DCI. “The number of postdocs on campus has declined pretty significantly,” he said. That’s a problem because academic scientists, and particularly physician-scientists, who both care for patients and conduct research, drive discovery of new and better treatments.To nurture the next generation of scientists and build a diverse, robust cancer workforce, the National Cancer Institute and DCI have put increased emphasis on education and training. DCI has launched 19 new training initiatives in the last five years, including efforts to engage high school students and undergraduates, all the way to junior faculty. (See “Filling in the Gaps.”)