A $100,000 Team Science Award from the University of Illinois Cancer Center supports a collaborative research project to gather pilot data to develop a next-generation cancer cohort to understand the causes and racial and ethnic disparities in early-onset cancers.
The one-year award runs through October 2025 and brings together epidemiologists, social scientists, cancer biologists and oncologists to plan for and design a new translational research cohort at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). The Cancer Center is part of UIC’s academic health enterprise UI Health.
Leading the project are Cancer Center members Kristen Malecki, PhD, MPH; Yamilé Molina, PhD; and Lisa Tussing-Humphreys, PhD, MS, RD.
“Despite tremendous progress in cancer prevention and control, there has been an increase in early-onset cancer incidence among individuals less than 50 years of age, particularly for breast, colorectal, female reproductive and urinary cancers. Trends are increasing most rapidly among Latino populations,” they explain in the project abstract.
About the Investigators
Principal investigator Malecki is Professor and Division Director of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences in the School of Public Health; Co-Investigator Molina is the Cancer Center Associate Director for Community Outreach and Engagement, Associate Professor in the Division of Community Health Sciences in the School of Public Health, and Associate Director for Community Engaged Research at the UI Health Mile Square Health Center, a federally qualified health center (FQHC) with a network of clinics serving communities and neighborhoods across Chicago and Rockford; and Co-Investigator Tussing-Humphreys is Co-Lead of the Cancer Center Cancer Prevention and Control Research Program and Professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Nutrition at the College of Applied Health Sciences.
2025 Award
For 2025, the Cancer Center selected the proposal, “Tissue Microenvironmental Regulation of Pre-Cancer Progression to Invasive Lung Cancer,” for a $150,000 Team Science Award. Learn more about that project here.