Award Recipients

2024 – 2025 

Susan L. Cohn, MD | Lecturer | Professor, Department of Pediatrics | Director, Clinical Sciences

2023 – 2024 

Dr. Elizabeth Mullen

Dr. Mullen is a pediatric oncology physician-scientist who currently leads the Dana-Farber Cancer Center/Boston Children’s Renal Tumor Program and has long standing leadership roles in the Children’s Oncology Group (COG) Rental Tumor Committee (RTC), as Vice-Chair of the committee and Chair of several clinical trials as well as a biology and banking study. Dr. Mullen’s clinical and translational research activities have included practice changing studies on radiologic surveillance for children with Wilms, successful identification of adverse biomarkers through liquid biopsy. Dr. Mullen has a deep passion for improving care for patients with rare renal tumors with the driving motivation that every cancer that affects a child is important, no matter how rare and how hard to study. She has multiple ongoing regional, national, and international collaborations that include roles in the International Society for Pediatric Oncology – Renal Study Group, HARMONICA (collaboration of COG and SIOP-RTSG), Renal Medullary Carcinoma Alliance, Steering committee member of the Dana Farber Harvard Cancer Center/Kidney Cancer Program and organizing committee of International Renal Tumor Biology Meetings. These collaborative efforts include clinical and translational research projects, advocacy, education, disease awareness and commitment towards establishing care consensus for rare tumors. Dr. Mullen is a primary author of the National Comprehensive Cancer Center Network (NCCN) guidelines for treatment of pediatric patients with FHWT, as well as of the International Collaboration on Cancer Reporting (ICCR) Histopathology Reporting Guide on Pediatric Renal Tumors.

2022 -2023

Michelle Monje, MD, PhD

Michelle Monje, MD, PhD, is a Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. She received her M.D. and Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Stanford and completed her residency training in neurology at the Massachusetts General Hospital/Brigham and Women's Hospital/Harvard Medical School Partners program and then returned to Stanford for a clinical fellowship in pediatric neuro-oncology and postdoctoral fellowship in developmental and cancer biology. Dr. Monje is recognized as an international leader in the pathophysiology of glioma, especially diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG)/H3K27M-mutated diffuse midline gliomas and a pioneer in the emerging field of Cancer Neuroscience. Her clinical focus is on childhood glial malignancies and cognitive impairment after childhood cancer therapy. Her laboratory studies neuron-glial interactions in health and disease, with a particular focus on mechanisms and consequences of neuron-glial interactions in health, glial dysfunction in cancer therapy-related cognitive impairment and neuron-glial interactions in malignant glioma.

Together with these basic studies, her research program has advanced preclinical studies of novel therapeutics for pediatric high-grade gliomas and cancer therapy-related cognitive impairment in order to translate new therapies to the clinic. She has led several of her discoveries from basic molecular work to clinical trials for children and young adults with brain tumors.

2021-2022 

Dr. Meredith Irwin

Dr. Meredith Irwin received her Bachelor of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Medical Degree from Harvard Medical School. She completed residency and clinical and research fellowship training in pediatrics and Oncology at Boston Children’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, where she identified novel roles for the p53 family proteins p73 and p63. Dr. Irwin joined the Division of Hematology/Oncology at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in April 2002 as a Clinician-Scientist and became the Solid Tumor Section head in 2010. In 2020 she was appointed as Pediatrician-in-Chief and Professor and Chair of Pediatrics at the University of Toronto. She is also a Senior Scientist in Cell Biology at the Research Institute and an international leader in pediatric cancer research and clinical trials. Her laboratory studies the genes and pathways that regulate cell growth and metastasis in neuroblastoma to identify novel therapeutic targets. She leads neuroblastoma clinical trials, risk classification and biomarker development as Chair of the Neuroblastoma Biology Committee for the Children’s Oncology Group (COG) and also chairs the Strategy Development Committee of the International Neuroblastoma Risk Group (INRG).

2020-2021

Dr. A Lindsay Frazier M.D. Sc.M.

Dr. A Lindsay Frazier M.D. Sc.M. is a Pediatric Oncologist at the Dana-Faber Cancer Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital, Professor of Pediatrics at the Harvard Medical School. Dr. Frazier’s clinical expertise within pediatric oncology is germ cell tumors (GCT). Dr. Frazier has served on the steering committee of the Children’s’ Oncology Group’s (COG) germ cell committee since 1995 and assumed leadership of the committee in 2007. Her role includes oversight of all current COG protocols and development of the strategic initiatives for future protocols across the spectrum of disease. In 2009, Dr. Frazier led the formation of an international group of pediatric germ cell tumor specialists from the United States and United Kingdom, “MaGIC—the Malignant Germ Cell International Collaboration” that has published a revised, evidence-based comprehensive pediatric risk classification system (Journal of Clinical Oncology 2014) which, now serves as the basis for next generation of international GCT clinical trials that will include investigators from the US UK India Brazil and Japan and is slated to open in 2016. In addition, to span the adolescent-young adult boundary that has previously limited clinical and scientific inquiry, MaGIC has recently been expanded to include the investigators and clinical trial data of the Gynecologic Oncology Group (ovarian GCT), the Medical Research Council (UK, testicular cancer) and ANZUP (Australia/New Zealand Urologic and Prostate Cancers).

2019-2020

Carlos Rodriguez-Galindo, MD

Carlos Rodriguez-Galindo, MD, Member, St. Jude Faculty, Executive Vice President, Chair, Department of Global Pediatric Medicine, Director, St. Jude Global, Associate Director, Outreach, Comprehensive Cancer Center. Carlos Rodriguez-Galindo, MD, serves as director of St. Jude Global and chair of the Department of Global Pediatric Medicine. He is also an executive vice president and holds the Four Stars of Chicago Endowed Chair in International Pediatric Research. Rodriguez-Galindo is leading an effort by St. Jude to ensure childhood cancer patients have access to quality care no matter where they live. A native of Barcelona, Spain, Rodriguez-Galindo first came to St. Jude in 1994 as a postdoctoral fellow. He went on to serve as a clinical researcher and faculty member for more than a decade before accepting a position in Boston. At the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital, he was director of the Pediatric Solid Tumor Program, medical director of the Clinical and Translational Investigations Program, and director of the Global Health Initiative in Pediatric Cancer and Blood Disorders. He also served as professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. In 2015, Rodriguez-Galindo returned to Memphis to lead a new program and approach, called St. Jude Global, to address pediatric cancer worldwide. Currently, St. Jude has 24 partner sites in 17 countries and addresses 2.4 percent of the global childhood cancer burden. Under Rodriguez-Galindo’s leadership, the program aims to expand St. Jude’s reach to 30 percent in the next decade and to develop the intervention models to ensure access to quality care for all children with cancer in the world. Rodriguez-Galindo earned his medical degree from the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

2018-2019 

Dr. Patrick Brown 

Dr. Patrick Brown is Associate Professor of Oncology and Pediatrics and Director of the Pediatric Leukemia Program at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. Dr. Brown earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the United State Military Academy in West Point, New York, and a master’s degree in philosophy and politics from Oxford University in Oxford, England. After earning his medical degree from the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, Dr. Brown was an intern and resident in pediatrics at Johns Hopkins and subsequently completed a joint clinical fellowship with Johns Hopkins and the National Cancer Institute in pediatric hematology/oncology. Dr. Brown is a member of the American Society of Hematology, the American Association for Cancer Research, the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American Society of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology. He is the Vice Chair for relapse and an executive steering committee member of the Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) Committee in the Children’s Oncology Group, and he co-chairs the National Comprehensive Cancer Network’s Clinical Guidelines Panel for ALL. He has published over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles and 13 book chapters. Dr. Brown’s research focuses on developing new therapies for childhood leukemia – specifically, leukemias with very low cure rates. His laboratory is working to develop new treatments that can overcome resistance to chemotherapy and that, unlike chemotherapy, selectively target leukemia-causing mutations. He is a principal investigator of several clinical trials that are testing promising combinations of standard chemotherapy with novel targeted drugs. He practices at the Johns Hopkins Hospital Children’s Center in Baltimore.

2017-2018

Dr. Charles G. Mullighan, MBBS (Hons), MSC, MD

Dr. Charles G. Mullighan, MBBS (Hons), MSC, MD, Member, Department of Pathology, Co-leader, Hematologic Malignancies Program, Medical Director, St Jude Biorepository, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital - Dr. Mullighan is a member of the Department of Pathology and Co-Leader of the Hematological Malignancies Program at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. He received his training in medicine, hematology and hematopathology in Adelaide, Australia, and undertook doctoral studies in Immunogenetics at the University of Oxford. His research examines the genetic determinants of leukemogenesis and treatment response in acute lymphoblastic leukemia and related disorders. His work has identified multiple new subtypes of ALL and has identified several genetic alterations that have entered the clinic as new diagnostic and therapeutic targets. His work has been published in over 200 peer-reviewed publications, including Nature, Nature Genetics, Science and the New England Journal of Medicine. He is the recipient of several awards, including the American Society of Hematology William Dameshek Prize, being named a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences, induction into the American Society of Clinical Investigation and American Association of Physicians, and the Meyenburg Prize for Cancer Research. He is the recipient of a National Cancer Institute Outstanding Investigator Award.

2016-2017

Dr. Colleen Delaney

Dr. Colleen Delaney is a Scientific Founder and the Chief Medical Officer of Nohla Therapeutics, Inc., a cellular therapy company focused on developing off-the-shelf, universal-donor therapies that require no HLA matching. Dr. Delaney’s research interests focus on the role of the Notch signaling pathway in hematopoietic stem cell regulation and ex-vivo expansion of umbilical cord blood stem and progenitor cells for clinical applications. Her group has developed a novel and clinically feasible method for the ex vivo expansion of cord blood derived hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells in the presence of Notch ligands. This work was translated into a novel pilot study investigating the use of ex vivo expanded cord blood progenitors to augment conventional cord blood transplantation. She has since extended this work to investigate the potential of cryopreserved, non-HLA matched “off the shelf” ex vivo expanded cord blood progenitor cells to provide rapid but transient myeloid reconstitution in the setting of cord blood transplant and following dose-intensive chemotherapy. Dr. Delaney is a Member and the Madeline Dabney Adams Endowed Chair in AML Research of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center Clinical Research Division, and an Associate Professor at the University of Washington in the Department of Pediatrics, Division of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology. She is an attending physician at Seattle Children’s Hospital and the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, and she established and directs the Cord Blood Transplant Program at Fred Hutch/SCCA. She is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the Damon Runyon Clinical Investigator Award, Seattle Top Doctor Award 2011/2012, the Dr. Ali Al-Johani Award in recognition of exemplary clinical medical care and compassion to patients and families in 2013, and the 2016 Leaders in Health Care: Outstanding Medical Research Award from Seattle Business Magazine. She also serves on the Board of Directors for ASBMT, is a founding member and on the Board of Directors for the Cord Blood Association and is a standing NIH grant review committee member. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from Wesleyan University, a MSc in Social Research and Social Policy from Oxford University, and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School. Colleen did her residency in General Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco and a Fellowship in Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center/ Seattle Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center.

2015-2016

Dr. James Olson

Dr. James Olson is a physician scientist who cares for children with brain tumors and discovers/develops new cancer therapies. His lab's work led to 5 national clinical trials, of which he leads a Phase III trial through the Children’s Oncology Group. His team invented chlorotoxin-based Tumor Paint, which led to the clinical candidate BLZ-100, developed by Blaze Bioscience and currently in human trials. Dr. Olson is the founder of Presage Biosciences and Blaze Bioscience: The Tumor Paint Company. He authored “Clinical Pharmacology Made Ridiculously Simple,” which has been the most used pharmacology board review book for 23 years. Dr. Olson earned a Ph.D. in Pharmacology in 1989 and an M.D. in 1991, both from the University of Michigan. He completed his residency in pediatrics in 1994 and completed his fellowship in pediatric oncology in 1997, both at the University of Washington. He is currently a full member at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, a Professor at the University of Washington and an attending physician at Seattle Children’s Hospital.

2014-2015 

Peter Adamson

Peter Adamson is Chair of the Children’s Oncology Group (COG), a National Cancer Institute (NCI) supported international consortium of more than 220 childhood centers that conducts clinical-translational research, including large-scale clinical trials, in children with cancer. He is Professor of Pediatrics and Pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and Alan R. Cohen Endowed Chair in Pediatrics at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). Dr. Adamson is Board Certified in Pediatric Hematology/Oncology and in Clinical Pharmacology. He is an internationally recognized leader in pediatric cancer drug development, having served until 2008 as Chair of the COG’s Developmental Therapeutics Program. Prior to becoming Chair of the COG in 2011, Dr. Adamson served as Director for Clinical and Translational Research at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Other key roles that he has served include co-Director of the University of Pennsylvania’s - CHOP Clinical Translational Science Award (CTSA), Program Director of the General Clinical Research Center (GCRC) and Principal Investigator of CHOP’s NICHD-funded Pediatric Pharmacology Research Unit (PPRU). His laboratory focuses on the clinical pharmacology of new drugs for childhood cancer.

2013-2014

Javed Khan, MD

Javed Khan, MD, Head, Oncogenomics Section, Pediatric Oncology Branch, Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute. The focus of his laboratory has been to apply genomic techniques in the investigation of pediatric malignancies and translate these findings to the clinic. Dr. Khan obtained his bachelor's degree in 1984 and his master's degrees in 1989 in immunology and parasitology at England's University of Cambridge. He subsequently obtained his M.D. there and the postgraduate degree of MRCP (Membership of the Royal College of Physicians), equivalent to board certification in the United States. After clinical training in internal medicine and pediatrics as well as other specialties, he received a Leukemia Research Fellowship. In May 2001, Dr. Khan joined the Pediatric Branch, NCI, as a tenure track investigator. Dr. Khan and colleagues have published a new model for diagnosis of cancer using artificial neural networks (ANN), a form of artificial intelligence, and microarray technology. In April 2001, Dr. Khan was recognized by the American Association for Cancer Research for his work in tumor profiling by receiving a Scholar in Training Award. Recently Dr Khan has led an international collaboration to perform comprehensive analysis of pediatric cancer genomes using next generation sequencing strategies.

2012 – 2013 

Garrett Brodeur, MD

Garrett Brodeur, MD, is associate chair for Research in Pediatrics at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), as well as professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania and adjunct professor at The Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. Dr. Brodeur is a graduate of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, where he completed his pediatric residency. He continued his specialty training with a fellowship in pediatric hematology-oncology at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. He returned to Washington University for a post-doctoral fellowship in molecular genetics in 1981, and he joined the faculty at CHOP in 1993. Dr. Brodeur maintains a special interest in the biology, genetics and treatment of neuroblastoma, the most common solid tumor in childhood, and is internationally recognized for his work in this area. He has studied certain genes, proteins and pathways that play important roles in the development and progression of neuroblastomas to develop therapies to treat advanced disease. Dr. Brodeur’s two principal research interests center on nanoparticle drug delivery and cancer predisposition. With respect to nanoparticle drug delivery, Dr. Brodeur and his colleagues aim to develop more effective and less toxic therapy for pediatric cancers, especially solid tumors like neuroblastoma. He was one of the true pioneers in neuroblastoma research, identifying although agents targeting specific genes, proteins, and pathways are needed, targeted drug delivery could dramatically improve efficacy and decrease toxicity.