Manushak Avagyan, Associate Medical Director at Agenus, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Day 1 at the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) Women in Cancer Immunotherapy Network (WIN) Leadership Institute.
Today wasn’t about new immunotherapy data. It was about something just as important: the people, relationships, and leadership that move science forward.
Sponsorship (Ashley Koegel).
Mentors advise; sponsors advocate – in rooms you’re not in.
Great work matters, but so do visibility, high-impact projects, and relationships with people willing to open doors when you’re not in the room.
Authentic leadership and personal brand (Elizabeth Travis).
Your brand already exists – the question is whether it reflects the leader you want to become. Authentic leadership is honesty, accountability, empathy, humility, and empowering others.
Navigating workplace politics
Decisions made in a vacuum make everyone else’s job harder. Don’t overthink a question – get clarification and proceed. When you need something, go to someone and say it simply: I need your help.
Work-life integration
There’s no such thing as balance.
There’s allocation – and it shifts. Some seasons family takes the whole focus, and the balance rarely sits at fifty-fifty. The skill is recognizing which season you’re in rather than trying to hold both at equal weight. (Tullia Bruno)
Women and work: alternate career paths
Stay open. Careers move sideways as often as up, and the useful posture is flexibility – learning new things, building a network before you need it, being willing to take an opportunity that wasn’t in the plan.
The challenges don’t disappear when you change environments; they change shape.
Keynote – structural barriers to women’s advancement in academic medicine (Jennifer Grandis)
An analogy occurred to me during the day, from my own field.
Checkpoint inhibitors don’t create an immune response – they release the brakes on one that’s already there. That’s what a program like WIN does.
The capability isn’t what’s missing. The constraints are.
Thank you to Lisa Butterfield, PhD – SITC Past President and the society’s first female president – who championed this program and led several of the day’s discussions, moderating with real skill, and to Jennifer Grandis, Ashley Koegel, Elizabeth (Liz) Travis and many other great panellists.
Looking forward to Day 2.”
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