2023 CURE Mentor Awards

On behalf of Cancer Center Director Dr. Laurie Glimcher, Deputy Associate Director Karen Burns White, and PI of the CURE R25 Grant Dr. James DeCaprio, DF/HCC Would like to congratulate the winners of this year’s 2023 CURE Mentor Awards for their commitment to mentoring the next generation of cancer researchers and clinicians.  

“This year we were particularly excited to award, for the first time, the day-to-day mentors that typically mentor students on behalf of the lab PI,” said Karen Burns White. “We are of course deeply grateful for the faculty that open their labs up to our students, but we recognize and are indebted to those day-to-day mentors, sometimes trainees, postdocs, techs, scientists, etc., that truly shape the research experience for our students,” she continued. 

To sign up to mentor a CURE student, please click here. 

2023 Mentor Award Recipients 

Peter Van Galen, PhD (BWH) - Assistant Professor – Mentor to Nour Farhat who said, “If there’s one thing I would want others to know about Peter’s mentorship, it’s that he is more than a supervisor; he is a catalyst for personal and academic development.” 

Courtney Andrade, MBA (DFCI) – Mentor to THREE students - Raleigh Reimonenq, Tania Hossain, Dylan Guijosa who wrote about Courtney, “…She is unafraid of being both realistic and idealistic as a role model. I am incredibly grateful to have her as a mentor.” 

Balaji Venkadakrishnan, PhD (DFCI in the lab of Himisha Beltran) – Mentor to Kenny Weng who said of Balaji, “He provides a welcoming environment where the mentee has leeway to fail and learn more from the experiment. It is a great place to start one’s research journey.”  

Shrestha Gosh, PhD (DFCI in the lab of Laurie Glimcher) – Mentor to Arlex Villatoro, who said of Shrestha, “She gave me and her other mentee pop quizzes about what we had learned throughout the week. She made it fun by making it a friendly competition, and we all laughed together as we competed to get the right answer.”