The Samuel E. Lux Fellowship is available to Harvard Medical School students who are interested in a full-time year-long research fellowship in a Pediatric Hematology/Oncology laboratory. – Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Quoting Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, on LinkedIn:
“After three years at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and a firm decision to pursue pediatric medicine, Soumyaa Mazumder found herself sitting at a laboratory bench, gleefully pipetting.
Mazumder rediscovered research through the Samuel E. Lux Fellowship, a one-year, full-time research fellowship in a Pediatric Hematology/Oncology laboratory. The Lux Fellowship and the David G. Nathan Summer Fellowship are both named for legendary Dana-Farber physician-scientists and leaders in hematologic oncology. The aim of the fellowships is to give HMS students an opportunity to do research in one of the laboratories at either the Division of Hematology/Oncology at Boston Children’s Hospital or the Department of Pediatric Oncology at Dana-Farber.
“I never thought I’d be back at the bench doing wet lab science again,” says Mazumder, who had studied molecular biology and worked in a basic science lab as a Harvard University undergraduate. “But after this experience, I feel very enthusiastic about having research as a part of my career.”
For Michael Pang, the 2022 Nathan Fellow who is entering his third year at Harvard Medical School, the experience was equally inspiring.
As an undergraduate at Harvard University, Mazumder assumed she’d pursue research. She worked in the lab of Lee Rubin of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. At the same time, she started volunteering with children at Shriners Children’s Hospital and Tufts Medical Center. She loved it.
The experience working with children led her to medical school and eventually to commit to pediatrics.
She has spent the past year working in the lab of Vijay Sankaran, a Dana-Farber clinician-scientist and Lodish Family Chair at Boston Children’s Hospital, with mentor Lara Wahlster, MD, a physician-scientist in the Pediatric Stem Cell Transplant Program.
Volunteering also shifted the trajectory of Pang’s career. As a biomedical engineering student at Emory University, Pang volunteered at Children’s Hospital of Atlanta.
“Nothing in my coursework elicited the sense of purpose I felt when working with patients,” says Pang, who is part of the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program.
Pang spent the summer of 2022 in Sankaran’s lab as part of the Nathan Fellowship. The work resulted in a publication in Cell with Pang as second author and his mentor in the Sankaran lab, doctoral candidate Jorge Diego Martin Rufino, as first author.
The David G. Nathan Summer Fellowship funds HMS students who would like to spend a summer in a Pediatric Hematology/Oncology laboratory. The fellowship provides a $5,000 stipend for the student and $2,000 for supplies in the host laboratory.
The Samuel E. Lux Fellowship is available to HMS students who are interested in a full-time year-long research fellowship in a Pediatric Hematology/Oncology laboratory. The fellowship provides a $30,000 stipend and $10,000 in supplies for the host laboratory.”