Geisel School of Medicine second-year student Armin Tavakkoli has been awarded a 2022 AOA Carolyn L. Kuckein Student Research Fellowship.
The prestigious fellowship is awarded to students for clinical investigation, basic laboratory research, epidemiology, social science/health services research, leadership, or professionalism. Tavakkoli will receive a $5,000 stipend to complete his research project, “Evaluating the Therapeutic Potential of FLASH Irradiation in Brain Tumor Treatment”.
“As an aspiring physician-scientist this fellowship will provide me with the ideal opportunity to independently and collaboratively execute a research project that aims to evaluate the therapeutic potential of a new form of radiation therapy, called FLASH radiation, in treatment of CNS gliomas,” Tavakkoli says. “This work is inspired by decades of work by my research mentor, Dr. Jack Hoopes, and made possible by the unwavering support of faculty and residents in radiation oncology and neurosurgery.”
Hoopes, a professor of surgery and radiation oncology at Geisel, says, “The timing of Armin’s AOA award is perfect as we have just received a five-year NIH NCI U01 grant: Optimization of MeV FLASH radiotherapy for normal tissue preservation that includes studies directly related to Armin’s research. And we have another pending NIH R01 grant, with the chief NASA radiation biologist that is also directly related to Armin’s fellowship effort.
“Beginning next March, Armin will be in the lab fulltime for a medical student research year. I can already tell he is going to be an exceptional research student—he is extremely bright, well informed, intuitive, and proactive,” Hoopes adds.
