LITTLE ROCK — Reham Sewilam, a Ph.D. student in the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) Graduate School and a trainee of the UAMS Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute, has become the first graduate student in Arkansas to receive the highly competitive National Cancer Institute (NCI) Predoctoral to Postdoctoral Fellow Transition Award.
The six-year fellowship, totaling $500,776, provides two years of support to complete Sewilam’s doctoral research and four years of funding for postdoctoral training. Fewer than 25 of the awards are given nationwide each year, and each institution may nominate only one applicant.
“This fellowship is truly a game-changer for me,” said Sewilam, a fourth-year doctoral student in the UAMS Graduate Program for Interdisciplinary Biomedical Sciences. “It not only makes me highly competitive for postdoctoral positions in leading research labs but also gives me the freedom to pursue high-impact, high-risk cancer research. Because it is one of the few NCI awards open to international students, it is especially meaningful to me.”
Sewilam’s research focuses on understanding how certain aggressive cancers, such as glioblastoma and pancreatic cancer, survive therapy-induced stress and develop resistance to treatment. Her research investigates replication gap suppression, a process cancer cells use to maintain DNA integrity despite damage from tumor-associated processes, as well as treatments, such as radiation or chemotherapy…