summer fellow grant

Nearing five years cancer free, Daniel Kingsley is determined to help kids with cancer and he’s hit the ground running! The college freshman is going to be working in a research lab as a St. Baldrick’s Summer Fellow and plans to pursue medical school. Future St. Baldrick’s researcher? We hope so!

Daniel Kingsley with Dr. Agne Petrosiute, his primary oncologist and a St. Baldrick’s Fellow, and Dr. Alex Huang, who Daniel will be working with as a St. Baldrick’s Summer Fellow.

Daniel was 12 when he was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or ALL.

“It was a ‘hits you all at once,’ like a brick wall, kind of feeling,” he said. “It takes the air right out of you, like, ‘Oh shoot, this is really happening.’ You never expect it to happen to you.”

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Anthony Hua, a St. Baldrick’s Summer Fellow, spent his summer working on a childhood cancer research project at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. You can help kids with cancer, too.

Anthony working in the lab.

“Being a pre-med undergraduate, you have to find many sources of motivation to keep you going throughout the long school year,” said Anthony Hua, a rising senior at the University of California, Los Angeles.

But that motivation wasn’t hard for Anthony to find. One of his biggest sources of inspiration were his memories as a camp counselor at Camp Ronald McDonald for Good Times, where he spent two weeks in 2012 volunteering with children with cancer.

“It was probably the most exhausting thing I’ve ever done, mentally and physically,” Anthony said. “The kids, some half or a third of my age, have to go through so much.”

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Jessica is a 2014 St. Baldrick’s Summer Fellow at the University of Iowa. Her St. Baldrick’s grant will support her work on a children’s cancer research project under the guidance of a pediatric oncology expert. See what else the money you’ve raised is doing.

Jessica and her mom in 2002, before her mom was diagnosed with breast cancer.

As a daughter and a child, I could not comprehend what was happening. Why my mother? Why me? I was traumatized.

Cancer doesn’t just affect the patient — it affects everyone around them.

I can remember crying for days, paralyzed with the fear that when I came home from school or woke up the next morning, my mom wouldn’t be there. I would wake up in the middle of the night, panic stricken, hearing my mom shrieking through a cycle of fears — first that she was dying, and finally that she was dead. In the morning, she would always explain that they were nightmares induced by her chemotherapy, but that didn’t change our reality that if the treatment didn’t work, she could be gone in an instant.

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Today, the St. Baldrick’s Foundation announced the 2014 Summer Fellow grants. Each $5,000 award will support a medical student working on a research project under the guidance of a pediatric oncology expert. While the lack of funding for pediatric cancer research might deter some students from choosing that as their specialty, exposing them to work in the field just might give them the push — and the passion — they need to pursue a career in children’s cancer research.

And who knows? One of these young scholars could one day discover a cure for childhood cancer.

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While the lion’s share of St. Baldrick’s grants are made in June (and your fundraising now will determine how much will be available!), March ushers in the first round of small grants.

And though they be small, they are mighty!  At $5,000 each, the Summer Fellowships granted for 2013 total $110,000, and what these grants can do is so important.

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Avinash Maganty (left), 2012 St. Baldrick’s Summer Fellow, Weill Cornell Medical College.

The St. Baldrick’s Foundation is proud to announce today that it has awarded $85,000 to support summer fellows at 17 institutions across the U.S., seven of which will be hosting a St. Baldrick’s Summer Fellow for the first time.

With only 4 percent of all federal cancer research funding dedicated to childhood cancer research, few young doctors are encouraged to choose this area as a specialty. These awards allow students who might be interested in studying pediatric oncology in medical school to work on a childhood cancer research project for their summer term and explore this field of study at an early stage of their college careers.

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