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Meet Rachel Mei, part of the 2025 Cancer Health Equity Summer Scholars (CHESS) program at the University of Illinois Cancer Center.

Pictured: Summer cancer research student Rachel Mei working in the lab.

One of the Cancer Center's summer research programs, CHESS is an eight-week program that trains and mentors high school students interested in careers focusing on cancer research and other health professions. CHESS is a collaboration with the UIC Urban Health Program. The Cancer Center is part of UIC and its academic health system, UI Health.

During the program, she was mentored by Cancer Center member Steve Seung-Young Lee, PhD, and PhD student Elie Abi Khalil, who is part of the Lee Lab in the Retzky College of Pharmacy at UIC.

Mei presented her project, "Multi-Resolution Exploration of Anti-PD-L1 Immunotherapy Against TUBO Tumor Model via Immunofluorescence Confocal and Lightsheet Microscopy," during the Cancer Center’s summer cancer research symposium.

"I got the opportunity to experience a proper lab environment aside from the few experiments I've done in my chemistry class. I got to work with different microscopes, imaging software, pipetting, making gels, you name it,” she said of her summer research experience.

Now a college freshman on the pre-med track and majoring in biological sciences, she said, "I'm aspiring to become a forensic pathologist, hence I'm going the MD route."

Click this link to learn more about our summer research programs.

Summer research programs are a critical part of the mission of the Cancer Center Cancer Research Training and Education Coordination (CRTEC) team to build pipeline programs to train cancer researchers. The goal is to educate, support and retain trainees to address the needs of the Cancer Center’s diverse patient population.