2.7 Relevance for my personal career development
Towards the end of my PhD I dedicated my future research to cancer metastasis, because metastasis is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths. With my future research I want to contribute to a better understanding of this deadly disease. My goal is to improve current mouse models to elucidate novel mechanisms and therapeutic targets of metastasis. The laboratory of Dr. Abate-Shen, which is specialized in developing GEMMs of metastatic prostate and bladder cancer, is an outstanding place for my postdoctoral training and will enable me to learn novel state-of-the-art techniques in the field of metastasis research. My expertise in different mouse models (GEMMs, xenograft) will allow me to spend more time in learning approaches, in which I am not yet an expert (FACS-sorting, computational analysis). Therefore, I am absolutely convinced that the postdoctoral training in the Abate-Shen laboratory will highly improve my practical skills in metastasis research and will be a significant step towards becoming an independent researcher in academia. Moreover, postdoctoral fellows in the Abate-Shen laboratory are encouraged to develop their own
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Abate-Shen is a leader in the field of urological oncology, director of research in the Department of Urology at Columbia University, associate director of Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center and leader of its Prostate Program. After obtaining her PhD at Cornell University and postdoctoral training at Roche Institute of Molecular Biology she established her own group in 1991 at University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School as assistant professor and rose to the rank of professor by 2001. At that time, Dr. Abate-Shen created the Prostate Program for the Cancer Institute of New Jersey and served as its co-leader from 1999 to 2007. Among various honors and awards, she was recently selected as an American Cancer Society Research