The Rhodes Scholarship is an international postgraduate award for students to study at the University of Oxford. Established in 1902, it is the oldest graduate scholarship in the world. It is considered among the most prestigious international scholarship programs in the world. Its founder, Cecil John Rhodes, wanted to promote unity between English-speaking nations and instill a sense of civic-minded leadership and moral fortitude in future leaders, irrespective of their chosen career paths. Initially restricted to male applicants from countries that are today within the Commonwealth, Germany and the United States, the scholarship is now open to applicants from all backgrounds and genders around the world. Since its creation, controversy has surrounded its initial exclusion of women, its historical failure to select black Africans, and Cecil Rhodes's own standing as a British imperialist.
Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman whose cancer cells are the source of the HeLa cell line, the first immortalized human cell line and one of the most important cell lines in medical research. An immortalized cell line reproduces indefinitely under specific conditions, and the HeLa cell line continues to be a source of invaluable medical data to the present day.
In genetics, an expressed sequence tag (EST) is a short sub-sequence of a cDNA sequence. ESTs may be used to identify gene transcripts, and were instrumental in gene discovery and in gene-sequence determination. The identification of ESTs has proceeded rapidly, with approximately 74.2 million ESTs now available in public databases. EST approaches have largely been superseded by whole genome and transcriptome sequencing and metagenome sequencing.
Cara Carleton "Carly" Fiorina is an American businesswoman and politician, known primarily for her tenure as CEO of Hewlett-Packard (HP). As chief executive officer of HP from 1999 to 2005, Fiorina was the first woman to lead a Fortune Top-20 company.
The Marshall Scholarship is a postgraduate scholarship for "intellectually distinguished young Americans [and] their country's future leaders" to study at any university in the United Kingdom. It is widely considered one of the most prestigious scholarships for U.S. citizens, and along with the Fulbright Scholarship, it is the only broadly available scholarship available to Americans to study at any university in the United Kingdom.
Carcinogenesis, also called oncogenesis or tumorigenesis, is the formation of a cancer, whereby normal cells are transformed into cancer cells. The process is characterized by changes at the cellular, genetic, and epigenetic levels and abnormal cell division. Cell division is a physiological process that occurs in almost all tissues and under a variety of circumstances. Normally, the balance between proliferation and programmed cell death, in the form of apoptosis, is maintained to ensure the integrity of tissues and organs. According to the prevailing accepted theory of carcinogenesis, the somatic mutation theory, mutations in DNA and epimutations that lead to cancer disrupt these orderly processes by interfering with the programming regulating the processes, upsetting the normal balance between proliferation and cell death. This results in uncontrolled cell division and the evolution of those cells by natural selection in the body. Only certain mutations lead to cancer whereas the majority of mutations do not.
Ruth Sager was an American geneticist. Sager enjoyed two scientific careers. Her first was in the 1950s and 1960s when she pioneered the field of cytoplasmic genetics by discovering transmission of genetic traits through chloroplast DNA, the first known example of genetics not involving the cell nucleus. The academic community did not acknowledge the significance of her contribution until after the second wave of feminism in the 1970s. Her second career began in the early 1970s and was in cancer genetics; she proposed and investigated the roles of tumor suppressor genes.
Marissa Ann Mayer is an American businesswoman and investor. She is an information technology executive, and co-founder of Sunshine Contacts. Mayer formerly served as the president and chief executive officer of Yahoo!, a position she held beginning in July 2012. It was announced in January 2017 that she would step down from the company's board upon the sale of Yahoo!'s operating business to Verizon Communications for $4.8 billion. She did not join the newly combined company, now called Verizon Media, and she announced her resignation on June 13, 2017. She is a graduate of Stanford University and was a long-time executive, usability leader, and key spokeswoman for Google.
Nancy Hopkins, an American molecular biologist, is the Amgen, Inc. Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is known for her research identifying genes required for zebrafish development, and for her earlier research on gene expression in the bacterial virus, lambda, and on mouse RNA tumor viruses. She is also known for her work promoting equality of opportunity for women scientists in academia.
Justine M. Cassell is an American professor and researcher interested in human-human conversation, human-computer interaction, and storytelling. Since August 2010 she has been on the faculty of the Carnegie Mellon Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and the Language Technologies Institute, with courtesy appointments in Psychology, and the Center for Neural Bases of Cognition.
Tory Burch is an American fashion designer, businesswoman, and philanthropist. She is the Executive Chairman and Chief Creative Officer of her own brand, Tory Burch LLC. She was listed as the 88th most powerful woman in the world by Forbes in 2020.
Siddhartha Mukherjee is an Indian-American physician, biologist, and author. He is best known for his 2010 book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, that won notable literary prizes including the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, and Guardian First Book Award, among others. The book was listed in the "All-Time 100 Nonfiction Books" by Time magazine in 2011. His 2016 book The Gene: An Intimate History made it to #1 on The New York Times Best Seller list, and was among The New York Times 100 best books of 2016, and a finalist for the Wellcome Trust Prize and the Royal Society Prize for Science Books.
Anil Potti is a physician and former Duke University associate professor and cancer researcher, focusing on oncogenomics. He, along with Joseph Nevins, are at the center of a research fabrication scandal at Duke University. On 9 November 2015, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) found that Potti had engaged in research misconduct. According to Potti's voluntary settlement agreement with ORI, Potti can continue to perform research with the requirement of supervision until year 2020, while he "neither admits nor denies ORI's findings of research misconduct." As of 2020 Potti, who is employed at the Cancer Center of North Dakota, has had 11 of his research publications retracted, one publication has received an expression of concern, and two others have been corrected.
Elaine Sarkin Jaffe is a senior National Cancer Institute (NCI) investigator at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) most well known for her contribution to hematopathology. She completed her medical education at Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania, receiving her M.D. degree from University of Pennsylvania in 1969. After an internship at Georgetown University she joined NCI as a resident in anatomic pathology, and has been a senior investigator since 1974, focusing on the classification and definition of lymphomas. Jaffe's early work helped to provide a deeper understanding of the origin of lymphomas, especially follicular lymphoma. Her team notably elucidated the difference between T cell and B cell lymphomas.
Ruth Chiquet-Ehrismann was a Swiss biochemist and cell biologist working on interactions in the extracellular matrix.
Anindya Dutta is an Indian-born American biochemist and cancer researcher, a Chair of the Department of Genetics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine since 2021, who has served as Chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in 2011–2021. Dutta's research has focused on the mammalian cell cycle with an emphasis on DNA replication and repair and on noncoding RNAs. He is particularly interested in how de-regulation of these processes promote cancer progression. For his accomplishments he has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, received the Ranbaxy Award in Biomedical Sciences, the Outstanding Investigator Award from the American Society for Investigative Pathology, the Distinguished Scientist Award from the University of Virginia and the Mark Brothers Award from the Indiana University School of Medicine.
Gopalan Shyamala was a biomedical scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, whose work in isolating and characterizing the progesterone receptor gene stimulated advances in breast biology and oncology. She was the mother of Vice President of the United States Kamala Harris and Maya Harris, a lawyer and political commentator.
Thea D. Tlsty is an American pathologist and professor of pathology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She is known for her research in cancer biology and her involvement in the discovery of cells that may be at the origin of metaplastic cancer, an invasive form of breast cancer.
Beverly M. Emerson is an Emeritus Professor of Biological Sciences at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies who uncovered details about how cancer becomes drug resistant. She is currently at the Oregon Health & Science University’s Knight Cancer Institute. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Katherine A. Hoadley is an American breast cancer researcher. As of 2017, she has served as the Associate Director of Cancer Genomics for the High-Throughput Sequencing Facility at UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. Her research is focused on understanding the biology of cancer through gene expression analyses and integrative genomic approaches.
