Rally Is Excited to Announce $1.4M in Funding for Career Development Awards

At Rally, we believe that innovative research begins with innovative researchers. That’s why we are thrilled to announce the recipients of our Rally Career Development Awards, an investment of $1.4 million in the future of childhood cancer research.

So, what is a Rally Career Development Award?

This award targets early-career investigators. In their first independent faculty appointment, they are transitioning from mentorship to launching their own research labs, publishing their own findings and applying for major research grants. It’s a pivotal moment — and Rally is stepping in to help.

The Rally Career Development Award provides $100,000 per year for three years, giving these trailblazers protected research time and the funding they need to pursue bold ideas that could change the future for kids with cancer.

Meet this year’s Rally Career Development Award recipients:

• The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia: Anand Bhagwat, M.D., Ph.D., for Novel Mechanisms of Acute Myeloid Leukemia Resistance to Cell Therapy
• Beckman Research Institute of the City of Hope: Rusha Bhandari, M.D., for Social Determinants of Health and Aging in Childhood Cancer Survivors
• Seattle Children’s Hospital: Catherine Carbone, Ph.D., for Rewiring Neuroblastoma Immune Circuits With Tumor Arrays
• The Hospital for Sick Children: Anirban Das, D.M., for Designing Biomarker-Guided Precision Trials for RRD Gliomas
• Dana-Farber Cancer Institute: Ulrike Gerdemann, M.D., for Overexpression of CD226 to Improve CAR-T Therapy for Pediatric CNS Tumors
• Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center: Courtney Jones, Ph.D., for Targeting Metabolic Vulnerabilities in Pediatric Acute Myeloid Leukemia
• Baylor College of Medicine: Sujith Joseph, Ph.D., for Targeting High-Risk Medulloblastoma Using Locally-Delivered Endoglin CAR-T
• Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine: Michael Koldobskiy, M.D., Ph.D., for Exploiting Epigenetic Vulnerabilities to Enable Immunotherapy for DMG
• Medical University of South Carolina: Casey Langdon, Ph.D., for Converging on AKT and XPO1 to Combat Ewing Sarcoma
• Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis: Yang Li, Ph.D., for Single-Cell Multimodal Omic Analyses of Epigenetic Dysregulation in pHGGs
• University of Alabama at Birmingham: Zaili Luo, Ph.D., for Targeting GABAergic Lineage Hijacking in Aggressive Medulloblastoma
• The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia: Susan McClory, M.D., Ph.D., for Immunologic Characteristics of Successful CAR T Cell Therapy
• Medical University of South Carolina: Christin Schmidt, Ph.D., for Human Unipolar Brush Cells as Cell-of-Origin for Group 4 Medulloblastoma
• The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center: Tao Yue, Ph.D., for Leveraging the Immune System for the Treatment of Metastatic Osteosarcoma