For more than 20 years, students at New Mexico State University have partnered with award-winning scientists at the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center in Seattle to receive hands-on training in cancer research areas spanning basic science, public health, human biology and clinical research.
These paid internships are supported in part by the Partnership for the Advancement of Cancer Research (PACR), a federally funded partnership between NMSU and Fred Hutch. Thanks to a recent $5.9 million grant renewal, this partnership will continue to benefit NMSU students and faculty for the next five years.
“This funding has benefitted junior faculty in cancer research, from bench science to social and public health sciences addressing health disparities, but the number one benefit is to all the undergraduate and graduate students we have trained under this grant,” said Graciela A. Unguez, Regents Professor in Biology and PACR director. “Our students are getting exposure to institutions like Fred Hutch and the University of Washington, so it's created more opportunities for our students.”
Over the last five years, Unguez explained how the partnership has expanded, adding outreach components in new population groups like youth and the LGBTQ+ community.
Unguez plans to continue expanding the program and including new areas of research during the next five years.
“The way that it's evolved in the last five years is for us to identify areas where we have people at NMSU with the expertise who can increase the representation of who we serve,” Unguez said. “For this cycle, I've decided that it's essential for us to cover mental health as it may relate to a patient who's been diagnosed with cancer, the loved ones, or the caretakers, there is a mental health toll on all of them. These issues also contribute to health disparities.”
PACR’s next cycle will focus even more on collaborating with community organizations through workshops and activities.
“Many organizations in the community, that's exactly what they want,” Unguez said. “They say, they don't have time to generate content and fact check it, but as part of the partnership, we can generate the content and give it to them. So, for the last two years of the previous cycle, we developed training videos in English and Spanish. I believe one of our roles is to develop research-based, cancer prevention content for our community organizations.”
As Unguez looks down the road to the next 20 years of the partnership, she envisions it growing and contributing to the expansion of NMSU’s capacity for research and education that impacts cancer and health disparities in surrounding communities while also transforming biomedical/biobehavioral research, ensuring new perspectives from all faculty and students contribute to the discovery process, and sparking the most innovative ideas as an inclusive and equitable community.
“My goal is to expand the program and welcome everybody's work, which may be one degree or seven degrees of separation from cancer,” Unguez said. “We want to have a very diverse portfolio of cancer research from the genome all the way to community health that shows in the recruitment of different faculty who are leading research projects.
“I think that it goes along with the message of this new cycle in the partnership, because I'm using it as like a Petri dish to test new ideas, to see how they work within the partnership, and then to determine how we can use some of those ‘best practices’ more broadly for the NMSU community.”
For more information about the partnership, visit cancer.nmsu.edu.
-30-
Photo is available at
CUTLINE: New Mexico State University student Clarissa Nunez in the lab at the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center in Seattle. (NMSU photo by Kaitlin Englund)
Photo is available at
CUTLINE: New Mexico State University student Nicolas Soliz examines a test tube in the lab at the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center in Seattle. (NMSU photo by Kaitlin Englund)