I hope everyone has enjoyed their somewhat truncated work week. I must confess to having mixed work with pleasure on Monday when I participated in the Swing Fore the Cure golf tournament at Westfields Golf course in Clifton, Virginia. I was the guest of Mark Decker, one of our Lombardi Gala stalwarts. As always, golf won. However, I had a great time and a significant portion of the proceeds are directed to support Lombardi research.
On Wednesday, I spent much of the day at a planning meeting at NCI for next summer’s NCI translational science meeting. Harold Varmus has given John Griffin (Dana Farber) and Jennifer Grandis (Pitt) free license to come up with a new meeting structure to replace the old NCI SPORE meeting format. The new meeting looks like it will be quite innovative and interesting and I look forward to participating in the evolution of the meeting program. I was sorry to have to miss Mary Beth Martin’s research seminar on Wednesday.
Thursday was dominated by a very busy clinic, followed by a dinner held as part of the Bob Dickson lectureship series. I do hope you were able to attend John Hanover’s excellent presentation Friday in the Research Auditorium. It was a pleasure to see Bob Dickson’s wife Jane and their daughter. I continue to be amazed by the enduring impact Bob has had on Lombardi and the many people here who loved him.
Friday afternoon, I unveiled our new NCI core grant program designations at a meeting with many of our program leaders and associate directors. Our five programs will be: Breast Cancer; Clinical and Experimental Therapeutics; Cancer Biology; Cancer Control; and Carcinogenesis, Biomarkers and Epidemiology. I expect that the precise names may be tweaked and virtually all cancer center members will either stay in their current program or migrate to the obvious new program (i.e., Cancer Biology, Clinical and Experimental Therapeutics, etc).
We have a lot of work to do as we prepare for our next competitive CCSG submission period. I will announce our program leaders next week, and the program leaders will be charged with identifying the handful of high-priority scientific themes that will define their programs as we move forward. Program membership assignments will likely be completed within the next four to six weeks. You’ll be hearing much more about this process as we move forward.
Enjoy your weekend!