EGRP Bulletin - Winter 2008-2009
EGRP Staff News
EGRP Program Director Receives NIH Merit Award; Accepts New Position at NCI
Isis Mikhail, M.D., M.P.H., Dr.P.H., Program Director in EGRP's Clinical and Translational Epidemiology Branch, received an NIH Merit Award at the NCI Director's Award Ceremony on November 4, 2008. Dr. Mikhail, and others in NCI's DCCPS and Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics who participate on the NCI Special Studies Institutional Review Board, were recognized for their superior service in developing new policies for protocol review that address human subject considerations specific to genome-wide association studies. Dr. Mikhail recently accepted the position of Director of the Research Development and Support Program at NCI's Office of Cancer Complementary and Alternative Medicine (OCCAM).
Dr. Mikhail joined EGRP in 2004. She focused on rare cancers, and organized a May 2007 meeting, sponsored by EGRP and the NIH Office of Rare Diseases (ORD), to stimulate epidemiologic research on rare cancers. Dr. Mikhail also worked with ORD on multiple rare cancer activities, including spinal cord tumors, chordoma, and Merkel cell carcinoma, and developed a funding opportunity announcement for the Rare Diseases Clinical Research Network. In addition, Dr. Mikhail developed a Program Announcement for the development, application, and evaluation of prediction models for cancer risk and prognosis with DCCPS' Applied Research Program and NCI's Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis.
Dr. Mikhail worked with several EGRP-sponsored research consortia, including InterLymph, the International Multiple Myeloma Consortium (IMMC), and Genetic Epidemiology of Melanoma (GEM). In addition, she worked with ORD to help junior investigators obtain funding to travel to consortia meetings. Dr. Mikhail was very involved with the DCCPS Health Disparities Interest Group and served as co-chair and chair from 2006 to 2008. In this capacity, she helped highlight EGRP-funded epidemiologic research focused on understanding cancer-related health disparities.
Gary Ellison Joins EGRP
Gary L. Ellison, Ph.D., M.P.H., has joined EGRP as an Epidemiologist and Program Director in the Modifiable Risk Factors Branch. Dr. Ellison has published on topics related to cancer epidemiology, surveillance, cancer survivorship, and behavioral methods and has been a journal reviewer and a member of the Small Grants in Cancer Epidemiology (R03) review group.
Before joining EGRP, he was on the faculty of the Department of Family and Community Medicine and Research Coordinator for the Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing Research Laboratory at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where he conducted research in cancer disparities, was a member of the Cancer Research Core for the National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NCMHD)-funded Project Export, and was Principal Investigator for a population-based pilot study of area-level social and economic composition and modifiable cancer risk factors. Dr. Ellison received an NIH research supplement to promote diversity in health-related research and was selected as an NCMHD Health Disparities Loan Repayment Program recipient and a Minority Scholar in Cancer Research by the American Association for Cancer Research.
Dr. Ellison was a member of the Genetic Epidemiology Unit at the National Human Genome Center at Howard University and completed postdoctoral training in 2002 as a Cancer Prevention Fellow at NCI, where he worked with DCCPS' Applied Research Program under Dr. Martin Brown's direction. Under contract with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Ellison managed the National Program of Cancer Registries-Cancer Surveillance System, which aggregated cancer incidence data and reported annually on the quality, timeliness, and completeness of state registry data. He earned a Ph.D. in epidemiology from the University of South Carolina, where he was an NCI Predoctoral Fellow and Outstanding Epidemiology graduate. Dr. Ellison also holds an M.P.H. from Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University (biostatistics) and a B.S. from The Ohio State University.
