8 Indian American physicians honored by SAASCR

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NEW YORK – Eight Indian American doctors were honored by the Society of Asian American Scientists in Cancer Research (SAASCR) on April 15, during the American Association for Cancer Research Meeting in Chicago, Illinois, for their outstanding contribution in cancer research.

Those who were honored include: Arun Kumar Rishi, Lalita Shevde-Samant, Subhash C. Chauhan, Selvarangan Ponnazhagan, Balaraman Kalyanaraman, Tayyaba Hasan, Anirban Maitra and Priyabrata Mukherjee.

Rishi is currently a professor at the Karmanos Cancer Institute and the Oncology Department of the Wayne State University (WSU) School of Medicine in Detroit, Michigan and has been working as a Health Science Specialist at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (USDVA) since 2001, he was appointed as a Research Career Scientist in 2017.

Shevde-Samant is professor in the Department of Pathology and Senior Scientist in the NCI designated Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and serves as the Associate Director for Education and Training for the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Chauhan is a tenured professor in Pharmaceutical Science Department and Pathology Department at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC) in Memphis, Tennessee and is also a Founding Director of the Institute of Biomarker and Molecular Therapeutics (IBMT).

Ponnazhagan is a tenured professor in the Pathology department at University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and holds the first Endowed Professorship in Experimental Cancer Therapeutics for his contribution and accomplishment in cancer research.

Kalyanaraman received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and postdoctoral training at the NIEHS in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

He joined the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) in Milwaukee in 1981 where he serves as the Chairman and a Professor of Biophysics and founded MCW’s Free Radical Research Center in 2000.

He also co-directs the MCW Cancer Center’s Cancer Biology program as well as directs the Redox & Bioenergetics Shared Resource and has received numerous awards.

Hasan is a Professor of Dermatology at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and a Professor of Health Sciences and Technology (Harvard-MIT), her research includes photochemical approaches to treatment and diagnosis of disease primarily in the areas of cancer and infections.

She has over 248 publications and 23 inventions from research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Department of Defense and Industry grants and leads a NCI funded multinational Program Project grant focused on image-guided treatment of pancreatic and skin cancers and an International consortium on developing low cost enabling technologies for image-guided photodynamic therapy of oral cancer.

Maitra is a professor of Pathology and Translational Molecular Pathology as well as the Deputy Division Head for Academic Science in the Division of Pathology/Lab Medicine, and the Scientific Director of the Sheikh Ahmed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan Center for Pancreatic Cancer Research at UT MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, prior to which he was a professor of Pathology and Oncology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Mukherjee is a tenured professor within the Department of Pathology at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences (OUHSC) Center in Oklahoma City, he is a TSET Scholar in Cancer Research and holds the Peggy and Charles Stephenson Endowed Chair in Laboratory Cancer Research and is the Associate Director of Translational Research in Stephenson Cancer Center.

All of the awards were presented by SAASCR president, Dr. Rajvir Dahiya, who has been a Professor and the Director of the Urology Research Center at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine and the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center since 1987.

SAASCR is a non-political and non-profit organization in California and has more than 5,000 scientists from Asian mainly Indian origin and working in the U.S. and Canada in the field of cancer research.