Rally Is Excited to Announce $1.2M 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 $1,250,000 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
• The Hospital for Sick Children: Anirban Das, M.D., D.M., for Designing Biomarker-Guided Precision Trials for RRD Gliomas
• Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine: Robyn Gartrell, M.D., for Effect of Radiation and CD47 on Microglia in Diffuse Midline Glioma
• Dana-Farber Cancer Institute: Riaz Gillani, M.D., for a Mechanistic and Computational Interrogation of DNA Damage in Ewing Sarcoma
• 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
• The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia: Jennifer Kalish, M.D., Ph.D., for Pediatric Liver Cancer Formation in Beckwith-Wiedemann Syndrome
• 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 Dependency in Select Pediatric Cancers
• Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis: Yang Li, Ph.D., for Single-cell Multimodal Omic Analyses of Epigenetic Dysregulation in pHGGs
• Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center: Michael Ortiz, M.D., for Clinical Translation of an XPO1 Dependency in Select Pediatric Solid Tumors
• Baylor College of Medicine: Jeremy Schraw, Ph.D., for Integrating Epidemiology and Genomics to Characterize Rare Childhood Tumors
• The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center: Tao Yue, Ph.D., for Leveraging the Immune System for the Treatment of Metastatic Osteosarcoma