Cancer investigators named new Dedman Family Scholars
By Carol Marie Cropper
Two early-career faculty members at UT Southwestern Medical Center have been appointed Dedman Family Scholars in Clinical Care, honors that come with a $600,000, four-year grant for each.
The support will go toward research expenses and salaries for the new Dedman Scholars – Dr. Aditya Bagrodia, Assistant Professor of Urology, and Dr. Neil Desai, Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology.
In 2009, The Dedman Foundation established the Dedman Family Endowed Program for Scholars in Clinical Care with a $12 million gift to the Southwestern Medical Foundation. That gift was matched to create a $24 million endowment designed to recruit the most promising clinician-scientists to UT Southwestern and to launch their careers under the mentorship of senior clinicians and clinical scientists.
A Tennessee native, Dr. Bagrodia received his medical degree from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in 2009. Between his third and fourth years of medical school, he came to UT Southwestern for a one-year fellowship as a Doris Duke Clinical Research Fellow. He returned to the Medical Center for his residency before completing a fellowship in urologic oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
Dr. Bagrodia then joined the UT Southwestern faculty in August as an Assistant Professor and also as Director of Urologic Oncology at the Parkland Health & Hospital System Outpatient Center.
He said he plans to focus his research on testicular cancer, studying the genetic makeup of tumors to try to predict how they will behave, and also how they will respond to various cancer treatments. He will work in collaboration with Dr. James Amatruda, Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Internal Medicine, and Molecular Biology.
The award will provide the means to begin his research at a higher level, Dr. Bagrodia said. “I just can’t imagine a better way to start out professionally,” he said.
Dr. Desai, a Californian, joined the UT Southwestern faculty in August 2015 after completing a residency at Memorial Sloan Kettering. He specializes in genitourinary and hematologic malignancies.
He plans to use the funding to study the interaction of the immune system and radiotherapy in the treatment of cutaneous T-cell lymphoma (a cancer of the white blood cells that starts in the skin), working with Dr. Heather Wickless, Assistant Professor of Dermatology and leader of the cutaneous lymphoma program, and Dr. Raquibul Hannan, Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology. Dr. Desai also aims to investigate the interaction of hormone therapy and stereotactic body radiotherapy – a precisely targeted radiation therapy – in prostate cancer.
The Dedman award will jump-start his career, Dr. Desai said, adding, “It’s nothing short of a transformative gift. It’s going to restructure what I can do here and when.”
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Dr. Amatruda holds the Nearburg Family Professorship in Pediatric Oncology Research, and is a Horchow Family Scholar in Pediatrics.
