October 2022

The RRS Annual Meeting convened in Hawaii October 16-19 and many of our faculty and trainees were presenters and moderators. Aadel Chaudhuri, MD, PhD received the Michael Fry Award, 6 trainees and faculty received Travel Awards and Julie Schwarz, MD, PhD, was installed as President of RRS.

February 2022

December 2021

Monday, December 6, Jennifer Sun, PhD, from the Azab Lab, defended her thesis “Macrophage-Based Immunotherapies for the Treatment of Multiple Myeloma”. She is in the PhD in Biomedical Engineering program and her advisor is Abdel Kareem Azab. Congrats Dr. Sun!!

October 2021

The Fall ’21 and Spring ’22 CBD Research Forum Seminar Schedule is as follows. All talks will be virtual until further notice. More information and Zoom links will be sent out prior to each Lab’s presentation.

  • October 18 – Goldstein Lab
  • October 25 – DeSelm Lab
  • November 1 – Markovina Lab
  • November 8 – Hallahan Lab
  • November 15 – Zhang Lab
  • November 22 – Azab Lab
  • November 29 – Schwarz Lab
  • December 6 – Rogers Lab
  • December 13 – Chen Lab
  • January 24 – Curiel Lab
  • January 31 – Bergom Lab
  • February 7 – Kapoor Lab
  • February 14 – Thotala Lab
  • February 21 – Chaudhuri Lab
  • February 28 – Singh Lab

September 2021

Vaishali Kapoor, PhD, Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology, has been awarded an Elsa U. Pardee Foundation grant for $119,261 to study the efficacy of radiation therapy using radiation sensitizing antibody-drug conjugates.

Jennifer Stanley, MD, PhD has received the RRS Scholar-in-Training Award.

August/September 2021

Aadel Chaudhuri, MD, PhD, has been awarded a MIRA R35 ESI award (R01-equivalent) of nearly $2 million over 5 years to fund his lab’s liquid biopsy research. He also had two research articles published in PLOS Medicine’s special liquid biopsy edition and was selected to be the inaugural author interview for PLOS Medicine.

May/June 2021

Carmen Bergom, MD, PhD, received the Michael Fry Award from RRS and is elected as Councilor-At-Large to RRS.

November 2020

Aadel Chaudhuri, MD, PhD was honored with the V Scholar Award. Full article here.

October 2020

Carl DeSelm, MD, PhD was honored with the Agilent Early Career Award. Full article here.

September 2020

Julie Schwarz, MD, PhD, was elected Vice President of the Radiation Research Society and will subsequently become President next year. Dr Schwarz is Director of our Cancer Biology Division and Vice Chair for Research in Radiation Oncology. She is the past recipient of the annual Michael Fry award from RRS. Radiation Research is one of our most important international organizations. RRS Members conduct research in all aspects of Radiation Biology, Hypertherapy, radiation exposures, and other sciences.

July 2020

Vaishali Kapoor, PhD, Instructor of Radiation Oncology, has been awarded a K22 Grant from the National Institutes of Health. The grant is an NCI Transition Career Development Award for $459,633 over 3 years with a start date of July 7, 2020.

Vaishali’s research is entitled “Role of midkine in molecular targeted therapy to TIP1 for lung cancer treatment”.

May 2020

Jennifer Stanley, MD, PhD, Holman Pathway resident, has been awarded a Research Resident/Fellow Grant from Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).

She will receive $30,000 to continue her work “Exploiting Radiation Induced Anti-tumor Immunity in Advanced-stage and Metastatic Ovarian Cancer”.

November 2019

Congratulations to our newest PhD, Dr. Fiona Ruiz, who successfully defended her thesis on Thursday, November 14, 2019.  Dr. Ruiz’s thesis, Investigating biological mechanisms of radiation resistance in advanced stage cervical cancer, was completed under the direction of Julie Schwarz, MD, PhD, Vice Chair for Research and Associate Professor of Radiation Oncology.

November 2019

The 2019 Annual Meeting of the Radiation Research Society was held this year in San Diego, CA, and was well represented by the  Cancer Biology Division with an impressive number of presenters and attendees.  Julie Schwarz, MD, PhD, Vice Chair for Research and Associate Professor, co-chaired the session HPV Associated Cancers and Radiation Response with Pippa Cosper, MD, PhD, Bentson Translational Research Fellow in the Department of Human Oncology, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, and a 2018 graduate of our Radiation Oncology Residency Program.  Dr. Schwarz’s presentation was Predicting Radiation Sensitivity in HPV Positive Cervical Cancer, and Dr. Cosper’s presentation was Chromosomal Instability Increases Radiation Sensitivity in Cervical and Head and Neck Cancer.  Rounding out WUSM Rad Onc’s presence at the session was Dr. Schwarz’s grad student Fiona Ruiz, whose presentation was HPV Viral Transcript Expression Affects Cervical Cancer Response to Chemoradiation Treatment.

Nadja Pejovic, a member of the lab of Aadel Chaudhuri, MD, PhD, gave an oral presentation in the session Imaging and Circulating Biomarkers of Radiation Response.  Nadja’s presentation was Size-based Enrichment of Urine-derived Cell-free DNA for CAPP-Seq of Non-genitourinary cancers.

Dr. Dennis Hallahan’s Lab was well-represented at the poster sessions by lab members Vaishali Kapoor, PhD, Abhay Singh, PhD, Dinesh Thotala, PhD, and Sukrutha Thotala.

Congratulations to all the members of the Cancer Biology Division for having their research chosen for presentation at RRS this year!!!

October 2019

PhD student Kinan Alhallak won the Best Poster Awardat the international meeting for nano-drug delivery systems, NanoDDS! Held at MIT in Boston,  Kinan got this award for his cutting-edge research in improving immunotherapy using drug delivery and biomedical engineering approaches. Kinan is a member of the Azab Lab.

October 2019

At the 2019 IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium in Glasgow, Scotland, Christopher Pacia, member of the Chen Lab and mentee of Hong Chen, PhD, was awarded the Student Paper Award! This is the most prestigious student award in the ultrasound field. His paper is entitled “Feasibility and Safety of Focused Ultrasound-Enabled Brain Tumor Liquid Biopsy (FUS-LBx) in a Porcine Model”.

April 2019

Cancer Biology Division Director & Associate Professor Dr. Julie Schwarz accepted a 2019 AACR Investigator Grant award to continue her work “Targeting CXCR2 to Improve Radiation Induced Anti-Tumor Immunity”

March 2019

Aadel Chaudhuri, MD, PhD, Hong Chen, PhD, and Stephanie Markovina, MD, PhD have all been awarded multi-year NIH Grants, totaling over $3.7 million

November 2018

Carl DeSelm, MD, PhD honored by NIH for innovative cancer research. He has been selected for inclusion in the High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program.

July 2018

Aadel Chaudhuri, MD, PhD, and Carl DeSelm, MD, PhD, join the Radiation Oncology faculty as physician scientists.

February 2018

Members of the Schwarz Lab received attention from the Washington University Source for their work combatting cervical cancer using drug therapies in combination with radiation.

Ramachandran Rashmi, PhD, and Julie Schwarz, MD, PhD

Read the article: Cutting off cervical cancer’s fuel supply stymies tumors (Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine News Release)

February 2018

Dennis Hallahan, MD, and Qin Yang, MD, PhD, are awarded an R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for their proposal, “Develop a novel reprogramming approach for glioblastoma multiforme treatment”.

Dennis E. Hallahan, MD
Qin Yang, MD, PhD

December 2017

Nathan Wong (Xiaowei Wang Lab) defends his PhD thesis, “Indentification of Prognostic Cancer Biomarkers through the Application of RNA-Seq Technologies and Bioinformatics”.

Read more about Nathan Wong’s research in the December 2017 Trainee Corner.

October 2017

Micah Luderer (Kareem Azab Lab) defends his PhD thesis, “Development of Novel Tumor-Targeted Compounds for Boron Neutron Capture Therapy”.


Read more about Micah Luderer’s research in the October 2017 Trainee Corner.

September 2017

Jin Zhang, PhD, joins the Cancer Biology Division as an instructor with a focus on Bioinformatics.

July 2017

Xiaowei Wang, PhD, is awarded an R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for his proposal, “MicroRNA biomarkers for oropharyngeal cancer”.

June 2017

David Curiel, MD, PhD, is awarded an R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for his proposal, “NOVEL TARGETED ADENOVIRUS”.