Leaders' Update  

On Friday, June 16, researchers from across VCU took part in Massey Cancer Center's annual Cancer Research Retreat. Keynote addresses were given by Robert Schnoll, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, about his research on smoking cessation; and Jeffrey Engelman, M.D., Ph.D., vice president and global head of oncology research at Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, about overcoming resistance to targeted therapies, particularly for drugs designed to target genetic mutations in lung cancers. At the afternoon poster session, nearly 75 research studies-the most in the history of Massey's Cancer Research Retreat-were presented by VCU graduate students and postdoctoral fellows and were evaluated for Excellence in Cancer Research Awards.

	Dipankar Bandyopadhyay, Ph.D. Cancer Prevention and Control member

Dipankar Bandyopadhyay joined Massey as a member of the Cancer Prevention and Control (CPC) research program in 2016. His research efforts are focused on investigating the effects of environmental and socio-demographic factors on the development of oral cancers. Bandyopadhyay is the director of Massey's Biostatistics Shared Resource Core and a professor in biostatistics at the VCU School of Medicine.