Dr. Ju Youn Kim, a postdoctoral associate in pharmacology in the laboratory of Dr. Samie Jaffrey and a student at the Clinical and Translational Science Center (CTSC) at Weill Cornell Medicine, has been selected through a national CTSC competition for an externship at the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly.
This competitive CTSC program, which is offered through Eli Lilly and the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, aims to provide doctors and scientists with hands-on experience in clinical trial design, clinical pharmacology, toxicology and other areas critical to drug development.
Dr. Kim, who also participates in a CTSC program called KL2 Scholars that trains postdoctoral researchers in the science and ethics of clinical and translational research, began her three-month externship at Eli Lilly earlier this month. There, she is working with the company’s neuroscience drug development team to advance a new chemical or biological entity through the earliest phase of drug development. The project will provide her with an opportunity to develop a regulatory strategy and regulatory filings while working within a medical team developing the study protocols and executing clinical studies.
Additional Awards and Honors
Dr. Christopher Mason, a WorldQuant Foundation Research Scholar, an associate professor of physiology and biophysics and of computational genomics in the HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud Institute for Computational Biomedicine and associate professor of neuroscience in the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute, in May received a Pershing Square Sohn Cancer Research Alliance Prize for Young Investigators in Cancer Research for his proposal, "Single-Cell Resolution of Leukemia's Epigenetic Evolution During Therapy." The Prize for Young Investigators in Cancer Research is awarded annually to fund promising young scientists in New York's medical institutions and universities. Dr. Mason will receive $200,000 in funding per year for up to three years to explore using new computational and biochemical methods to target and reprogram specific sites of epigenetic aggressiveness in acute myeloid leukemia patients. He was also given a mentor in the pharmaceutical industry and the opportunity to present his work to scientific and business audiences. Dr. Mason was honored May 25 at the Pershing Square Sohn Alliance's annual prize dinner in New York.
Dr. Philip J. Wilner, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine and senior vice president and CEO of NewYork-Presbyterian/Westchester Division, will be honored with the 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award by Planetree for his tireless work to bring humanity and a holistic approach to behavioral health. Planetree is a not-for-profit organization that partners with healthcare organizations while working to inform public policy and guide implementation of care delivery practices. Dr. Wilner will receive the award at the annual Spirit of Planetree Awards Nov. 2 in Chicago.