HSCI Affiliated Faculty members Xi He, PhD and Matthew Meyerson, MD, PhD, will receive prestigious American Cancer Society Research Professor Awards. The awards go into effect January 1, 2015.

Dr. He is an internationally recognized leader in the field of "wnt signaling." His professorship will support his continued work into the molecular pathway, which is defective in many cancers including lung and colorectal cancers.

Dr. Meyerson is a Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Center for Cancer Genome Discovery at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute at MIT.  He is regarded as the international leader in the field of lung cancer genomics. His professorship will support continued work that has already defined the underlying genetic basis for almost three in four lung cancers, providing the framework for personalized treatment of patients with the disease.

The American Cancer Society has awarded 83 national research and training grants totaling $44 million in the second of two grant cycles for 2014. The grants will fund 83 investigators at 50 institutions across the United States; 73 are new grants while 10 are renewals of previous grants. In addition, 99 research applications for funding were approved totaling more than $56 million that could not be funded due to budgetary constraints.

For more information about the American Cancer Society Research Program, please visit http://www.cancer.org/research

This announcement was made available by the American Cancer Society. For more than 65 years, the American Cancer Society has funded research and training of health professionals to investigate the causes, prevention, and early detection of cancer, as well as new treatments, cancer survivorship, and end of life support for patients and their families. Since its founding in 1946, the American Cancer Society’s extramural research grants program has devoted more than $4 billion to cancer research and has funded 47 researchers who have won the Nobel Prize.