Key Dates


Abstract Submission Opens: 11/10/2021

Abstracts Due: 01/05/2022

Decisions Sent Out: 01/12/2022 

Early Career Investigators

DF/HCC Celebration of Early Career Investigators in Cancer Research

Early career investigators are a unique reservoir of new ideas, innovation, and excellence in cancer research. To celebrate this, we welcome you to join the 9th Annual DF/HCC Celebration of Early Investigators in Cancer Research. This symposium will showcase the talent of early career investigators at the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center (DF/HCC) who work in several areas of population science, including epidemiology, biostatistics, outcomes, diversity, and survivorship. We invite all members of the public to attend the event. We also invite students, post-docs, residents, clinical fellows, and early career investigators to submit abstracts for consideration as oral or poster presentations. We look forward to an exciting afternoon of discussion, sharing new discoveries, and building new collaborations. – Lorelei Mucci, ScD (HSPH), Meir Stampfer, MD, DrPH (BWH), Giovanni Parmigiani, PhD (DFCI), Erica Feick (DFCI) and Bailey Vaselkiv (HSPH).

This event will be 100% virtual via Zoom. The Zoom link will be sent to registered attendees prior to the event.

2022 Agenda

January 19, 2022

1:00 - 1:05 pm Introduction 
1:05 - 1:30 pm

Keynote Speaker:

Ann H. Partridge, MD, MPH
Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School
Vice Chair of Medical Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Director of the Adult Survivorship Program  

Talk Title: "Improving Care and Outcomes for Young Women with Breast Cancer: From Observation to Intervention"

Biography: Hide Biography


Ann Partridge, MD, MPH is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Vice Chair of Medical Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where she also serves as Director of the Adult Survivorship Program and leads the Program for Young Women with Breast Cancer. As a medical oncologist and clinical researcher, she has sought to improve the care and outcomes of patients with cancer by conducting research, and by developing innovative clinical programming.


Dr. Partridge serves in leadership roles nationally and internationally including as co-chair of the Breast Committee of the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology and co-chair of the biennial ESMO-ESO sponsored Breast Cancer in Young Women Conference. She also served as Chair of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Advisory Committee on Breast Cancer in Young Women from 2010-17. She has received prior awards and grants including a Champions of Change award from the White House, an ASCO Improving Cancer Care Grant, the CDC Carol Friedman Award, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Outstanding Investigator Award for Breast Cancer, and the Ellen L. Stovall Award in Cancer Survivorship from ASCO, and the A. Clifford Barger Excellence in Mentoring Award from Harvard Medical School.

After graduating from Georgetown University, Dr. Partridge received her medical degree from Cornell University Medical College, pursued an internal medicine residency at the Hospital for the University of Pennsylvania, and completed Medical Oncology and Hematology fellowship at Dana-Farber/Partners CancerCare. She earned a Master of Public Health degree at the Harvard School of Public Health.
1:30 - 2:00 pm

Panel Discussion

Tal Sella (tal_sella@dfci.harvard.edu)
He received his medical degree from Tel Aviv University Sackler and with his medical oncology residency at Sheba Medical Center in Tel-HaShomer completed and a fellowship grant from APF, Dr. Tal Sella was accepted to the Advanced Fellowship program in breast oncology at the prestigious Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, MA.

Tamryn Gray (Tamryn_gray@dfci.harvard.edu) 
Tamryn Gray is an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School within the Department of Psychosocial Oncology and Palliative Care at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Department of Medicine (Division of Palliative Medicine) at BWH. She also holds joint roles as a research scientist within the Phyllis F. Cantor Center for Nursing and Patient Services Research and a clinical-administrative role as a Clinical Nurse Specialist in the Division of Stem Cell Transplantation and Cellular Therapies, Department of Medical Oncology at DFCI.

Peter Miller  (Pmiller4@partners.org)
Peter Miller grew up in Atlanta and moved to Cambridge after high school where he completed his undergraduate degrees in Chemical Engineering and Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He completed his MD and PhD at Harvard Medical School where he studied leukemia stem cells in the laboratory of Gary Gilliland and Benjamin Ebert. After graduation, he completed an internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital and fellowship in medical oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute / Massachusetts General Hospital combined program. His research focuses on the biology of myeloid malignancies and he is clinically part of the leukemia program at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
2:00 - 2:45 pm

Oral Presentations 

Breakout Room 1:

David Lee: Prevalence of monoclonal gammopathies, including an age-related monoclonal gammopathy of indeterminate potential (MGIP), and their associated risk factors and clinical outcomes: results of a screening study by mass spectrometry in a high-risk population

Sofia Vega: Expanding Bayesian Methods to Estimate Causal Effects of Environmental Exposures on Childhood Leukemia

Andrea Romanos-Nanclares: Insulinemic Potential of Diet and Risk of Total and Subtypes of Breast Cancer Among US Women

Pragya Kakani: The impact of physician-hospital integration on spending and quality of oncology care

Chaoran Ma: Association of Prostate Cancer Risk Variants with Gene Expression in Prostate Stroma

Phillip Nicol: pcDiffPop: Robust identification of perturbed cell types in single-cell RNA-seq data


Breakout Room 2:

Jim Doolin: A Phase II Feasibility Study of Electronic Patient Reported Outcomes (ePROs) for Oral Cancer Directed Therapies (OCDT)

Alexandra Bercow: NCCN Guideline-Discordant Care in Early-Stage Vulvar Cancer: A National Cancer Database Study

Kristen Brantley: A metabolomic analysis of adiposity measures and pre- and postmenopausal breast cancer risk in the Nurses’ Health Studies

Cheng Peng: Regular aspirin use, breast tumor characteristics and long-term breast cancer survival

Bailey Vaselkiv: Intratumoral vitamin D signaling and lethal prostate cancer

Qiaoli Wang: Weight loss and subsequent cancer diagnosis: a prospective cohort study
2:45 - 3:30 pm

Poster Session   [Poster Booklet]

Khalid Alkhatib: Racial and Ethnic Disparities in High-Risk Cancer Genetic Testing Awareness in the United States; Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) Analysis [Poster] [Video]

Naiyu Chen: Impact of Age, Race, and Family History on COVID-19 Related Changes in Breast Cancer Screening and Diagnostic Imaging among the Boston Mammography Cohort Study [Poster] [Video]

Lydia Chevalier: Evaluating Sensitive Symptoms in Young Adult Cancer Survivors: Feasibility and Acceptability of Sexual Health and Suicide Items Across Administration Modes [Poster] [Video]

Cami Christopher: Improved insulin resistance and adiponectin among minority cancer survivors through circuit, interval-based exercise [Poster] [Video]

Krinio Giannikou: Distinct oncogenic signatures in malignant PEComa and leiomyosarcoma identified by integrative RNA-seq and H3K27ac ChIP-seq analysis [Poster] [Video]

Tian Gu: Synthetic data integration by leveraging external summary-level data to improve the risk prediction of prostate cancer [Poster] [Video]

Corinne Jansen: Does the histologic carcinoma subtype correlate with outcomes in uterine carcinosarcoma? [Poster][Video]

Dong-Woo Kang: Impacts of aerobic exercise on cardiorespiratory fitness and biochemical progression in men with prostate cancer on active surveillance: a randomized controlled trial [Poster] [Video]

Claire King: Inequities in referrals to a breast cancer personalized risk assessment and reduction program at an academic medical center [Poster] [Video]

Mara Koelker: Impact of exercise on physical health status in bladder cancer patients [Poster] [Video]

Muhieddine Labban: Access to definitive treatment and survival for intermediate-risk and high-risk prostate cancer at hospital systems serving health disparity populations [Poster] [Video]

Daniel Lage: CONTINUUM: A Pilot Care Transition Intervention for Hospitalized Patients with Advanced Cancer [Poster] [Video]

Colleen McGrath: Health Behaviors among Older Men and Cancer Survivors during the COVID-19 Pandemic [Poster] [Video]

Jennifer Mongiovi: Associations between intrauterine device and oral contraceptive use with ovarian cancer risk among 6 case-control studies from the Ovarian Cancer Association Consortium [Poster] [Video]

Eve Nagler: Scaling up tobacco control in India: Comparing smartphone to in-person training for implementing an evidence-based intervention to reduce tobacco use among schoolteachers: Study overview [Poster] [Video]

Kaitlin Nicholson: Patient-reported drivers of financial toxicity in gynecologic cancers: A focus group study [Poster] [Video]

Yuho Ono: Ampullary Neoplasia in Young Patients: Syndromic and non-syndromic associations [Poster] [Video]

Vineet Raghu: Validation of a deep learning-based model to estimate lung cancer risk from chest radiographs [Poster] [Video]

Takashi Shimizu: Associations of molecular characteristics with tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes in non-microsatellite instability-high colorectal cancer [Poster] [Video]

Alaina Shreves: Sleep problems among long-term prostate cancer survivors by metastatic disease status [Poster] [Video]

Tomotaka Ugai: Smoking and Colorectal Cancer Incidence by T cell, Macrophage, and Myeloid Cell Infiltrates in Cancer Tissue [Poster] [Video]

Rebekah Wilson: Impact of Exercise on the Complications of Corticosteroids in Patients with Graft-Versus-Host Disease following Allogeneic Stem Cell Transplantation: the RESTART Trial [Poster] [Video]

Yan Yan: Identifying strain-specific functional genes in colorectal cancer
[Poster] [Video]

Yin Zhang: Incident early- and later-onset type 2 diabetes and risk of early- and later-onset cancer [Poster] [Video]
3:30 pm Award Announcement