Neil Shah, MD, PhD
Edward S. Ageno Distinguished Professor,
Leader, Hematopoietic Malignancies Program
Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center
“The UCLA STAR Program facilitated my ability to pursue a career in academic medicine. Upon entering the program during my 3rd year of medical school at UCLA, the STAR Program paid my remaining tuition, which enabled me to avoid further accumulating debt and keep my career options open. Additionally, knowing early that I would be able to pursue my Internship, Residency and Fellowship at UCLA gave me the opportunity to begin thinking about potential postdoctoral research mentors and projects and career goals at an early stage. Critically, the STAR Program provided funding and a supportive, scholarly environment during my postdoctoral research years. The path I have traveled to a successful career as a tenured physician-scientist, whose research has led directly to the development of an FDA-approved targeted therapeutic that is enabling tens of thousands of people around the world with chronic myeloid leukemia and Philadelphia chromosome-associated acute lymphoblastic leukemia live longer and fuller lives, was undoubtedly made much easier as a result of my involvement with the UCLA STAR program.”
– Dr. Neil Shah
Rick Fairhurst, NIH, MD, PhD
Chief, Malaria Pathogenesis and Human Immunity Unit,
Laboratory of Malaria and
Vector Research
Director, NIH MD/PhD Partnership Training Program
NIAID, National Institutes of Health
“As the first Infectious Diseases fellow in the UCLA STAR Program, I was strongly encouraged to customize my training to fit my interests and develop my career. To support my future study of malaria and other tropical infectious diseases as soon as possible, the Program’s faculty helped me design the most relevant and accelerated pathway I could envision – one that exposed me to tuberculosis, leprosy and neurocysticercosis patients, and even mosquito and tick abatement programs! By allowing me to train at multiple hospitals and specialty clinics in Southern California, to complete my internship, residency and clinical fellowship within 3 years, and transfer to the NIH to meet malaria in person, the UCLA STAR Program essentially launched my early career. Within 2 months of arriving at the NIH, I was on a plane to Mali to treat my first malaria patient as the principal investigator of a new clinical protocol. My recent successes in deciphering the mechanisms of human resistance to malaria in Africa, and parasite resistance to multiple antimalarial drugs in Southeast Asia, all stem from the Program’s initial challenge to me: find the best place in the world to do malaria research, then go there and become the best malariologist you can be.”
– Dr. Rick Fairhurst
