Thursday, April 18, 2019

Rania Labib, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral fellow in the NIH African Postdoctoral Training Initiative (APTI) working in the lab of Beverly Mock, Ph.D., Deputy Chief of the Laboratory of Cancer Biology and Genetics (LCBG). The new postdoctoral training fellowship program is the result of a partnership between NIH, the African Academy of Sciences and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation under the auspices Coalition of African Research and Innovation. The program’s goal is to train fellows in high-priority global health research areas such as infectious diseases, maternal and child health and skill development for clinical and translational research while building bridges and lasting connections between the partner organizations and African scientists and institutions.

Dr. Labib came to NCI from Egypt where she headed the biorepository at Children’s Cancer Hospital Egypt. After hearing of APTI through an email from the International Agency for Research on Cancer, she felt that her dream of coming to NIH and NCI was finally in her grasp. As part of the fellowship, she will spend two years at NCI conducting initial experiments in Dr. Mock’s lab, where she hopes to make a difference in possible treatment options for children with Burkitt lymphoma. The two will work with a team in the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics to look at a variety of genetic and environmental factors associated with treatment outcomes from a large case-control cohort collected across three different countries in Africa. Dr. Labib will later return to Egypt to continue collaborating on experiments using samples from the Egyptian biobank to evaluate findings and applications of the work conducted at NCI.

Find out more: https://ccr.cancer.gov/news/article/african-postdoctoral-training-initiative-fellow-looks-forward-to-collaborating-within-nci