Dr. Marcelo Bento Soares is a Professor of Cancer Biology and Pharmacology at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria (UICOMP). He joined the institution in February 2015 driven by the motivation to rebuild the Department of Cancer Biology and Pharmacology, to recruit and to mentor junior faculty, to facilitate development of intellectually synergistic interdisciplinary collaborations across the medical school.
He has also been motivated to bring compassion and emotional balance training to the medical students, residents, physicians and nurses, while furthering his own research program on pediatric brain tumors.
In Winter 2017, Dr. Bento Soares, along with three other colleagues from UICOMP, completed Emory University’s year-long Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT®) Teacher Certification Program, and, since then, they have been teaching CBCT® to their students, residents, faculty, leadership at UICOMP and affiliated hospitals, and to the Peoria community at large including principals, teachers, and counselors at the Peoria Public School and the senior leadership of the Peoria Police Department. He has made various publications in the areas of genomics, cancer research and cancer epigenomics.