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Director, Center for Epigenetics Research Director, Leukemia Center Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center New York, NY

On Receiving the Scholar Award

I’m fairly certain the Scholar Award was the first fellowship I applied for and, therefore, it was the first one I received. It provided early validation that what I was doing at the time was something of interest and that I could be successful in the grant process. It’s a vote of confidence early in your career that the community has some expectation that you’ll be able to move forward and do something interesting. In that regard, obviously, it’s a terrific feeling. It motivates you to move forward and start applying for the next grant and so on.

I would say that the most important part of the award is the recognition that your colleagues think that the line of investigation you’re pursuing is potentially interesting. The confidence that comes along with winning the award is critical.

Research Focus

The research we were doing at the time would have then been considered risky. What we were proposing to do is to perform microarray analysis on leukemia, which had only really been done on any real scale once before. The Scholar Award allowed that to go forward and certainly motivated me to keep going forward in that direction. My career is still in line with what we said that grant was going to do.