Insa presented her poster “CDH1 Loss Drives Tumor Immune Microenvironment Remodeling and Metabolic Reprogramming in a Syngeneic ER+ ILC-like Model” at the Pitt Postdoc Research Symposium and won the professional development award for best poster presentation.
Abdalla Wedn was awarded his Ph.D. after defending his dissertation entitled “Epigenetic Upregulation of TFAP2B Drives Cell Proliferation and Tumor Growth in Invasive Lobular Breast Carcinoma”!
Congrats to Brent Schlegel, who won first prize in the Young Scientist Excellence Award competition at the 2026 Mid-South Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Society (MCBIOS) conference, held at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida. Brent was selected from a pool of 150 competitors, presenting his work on multi-omic profiling of patient-derived breast cancer organoids.
Congrats to Lauren Grove who presented her research and was selected to receive the Mary Baker Marks Fellowship by Dr. Stanley Marks and Dr. John Byrd. This fellowship is awarded to second year students in the Oncology Graduate Program.
Congratulations to Dr. Steffi Oesterreich for being awarded the Provost’s Award for Excellence in Doctoral Mentoring!! Well deserved! https://www.pittwire.pitt.edu/accolades-honors/2026/03/04/provosts-award-doctoral-mentoring
Match Day has arrived! Neil Carleton will be headed up to Brigham and Women’s/Harvard for Internal Medicine, Kanako Mori matched at UPMC Internal Medicine, and Fangyuan (Chelsea) Chen matched to Jacobi Medical Center in NYC.
Congratulations to Dr Neil Carleton for being awarded this year’s Hamilton Translational Science award from the MSTP program. (Curiously, Dr Nolan Priedigkeit MD PhD, another prior trainee from the Lee-Oesterreich lab, was the first awardee a few years back)”
At the PMWC conference, Adrian Lee, PhD, Director of the Institute for Precision Medicine (IPM), chaired the Clinical Utility of Liquid Biopsies track, leading a critical discussion on “Improving Sensitivity of MRD and MCED – Tumor-agnostic vs. Tumor-informed ctDNA Approaches.” Joining him on the panel was Marija Balic, MD, ScD, MBA, (UPMC Hillman Cancer Center) co-director of the Magee Women’s Cancer Program and clinical co-leader of the Women’s Cancer Research Center (WCRC). A leader in breast clinical science, she oversees Pitt and UPMC’s breast cancer program.
