YSM News and Recognition

Su Deng, PhD, was recently selected for a Department of Defense (DoD) Prostate Cancer Research Program Idea Development Award for her project on “Harnessing Metabolic Dependencies to Reverse Lineage Plasticity and Therapy Resistance in Lethal Prostate Cancer.” This work aims to identify and target transcriptional and metabolic vulnerabilities to overcome therapy resistance in advanced prostate cancer. Deng, assistant professor in the Department of Urology, focuses her research on understanding the mechanisms of therapy resistance in advanced prostate cancer and developing strategies to overcome it.

Xiaona Lu, MD, PhD, received two prestigious awards at the 2026 American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy (ASGCT) annual meeting. Lu was awarded both the Career Development Award, which supports independent, transformative pilot studies in cell and gene therapy, and the Excellence in Research Award, which recognizes top-scoring abstracts submitted by early-career researchers. Lu, a research scientist in the laboratory of Yong-Hui Jiang, MD, PhD, conducts translational research focused on neurodevelopmental disorders. She generates and utilizes genetically engineered animal models and human iPSC-derived neurons and brain organoids to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying neurodevelopmental disorders and develop targeted therapies to treat them.

Markus Müschen, MD, PhD, was selected by the Harrington Discovery Institute as a recipient of its 2026 Scholar-Innovator Award. The scholar awards support breakthrough new treatments for common and rare diseases, including cardiovascular, inflammatory, hematologic, and oncologic disease, using small molecule, biologic, cell-based, and genetic therapies. Müschen, Arthur H. and Isabel Bunker Professor of Medicine (Hematology), was selected for his project "Drugging a Key Enzyme to Treat Immune Cell Cancers."

Maisie Orsillo, DO, won the Mack Lipkin, Sr., Associate Member Award from the Society of General Internal Medicine (SGIM). This award is presented to the scientific presentations considered most outstanding by students, residents, and fellows during the 2026 SGIM annual meeting. Orsillo, an instructor in internal medicine, received the award for her work titled "We Are the Doctors for You: A Novel Curriculum for Internal Medicine Residents on Caring for Adults with Disabilities." In this work, she developed a curriculum for internal medicine residents, which included community volunteers with disabilities and their caregivers in panels and practice clinical encounters. In a trial to assess her curriculum, whe found improved confidence, comfort, and attitudes among residents who participated.

Lajos Pusztai, MD, DPhil, professor of medicine (medical oncology and hematology), will receive this year’s Giants of Cancer Care® Award for Prevention/Genetics in honor of his landmark achievements in oncology research and clinical practice. Pusztai is scientific co-director of the Center for Breast Cancer at Yale Cancer Center and co-leader of the center’s Genomics Genetics and Epigenetics Program. His research has helped establish the fundamentally different characteristics of estrogen receptor-positive and estrogen receptor-negative breast cancers. He has been a pioneer in evaluating gene expression profiling as a diagnostic technology to predict chemotherapy and endocrine therapy sensitivity and shown that different biological processes are involved in determining the prognosis and treatment response in different breast cancer subtypes.

Caroline Richburg, MD, a general surgery research resident, has received the 2026 Conquer Cancer Young Investigator Award for Veteran Cancer from the American Society of Clinical Oncology. The award supports early-career physicians transitioning from fellowship to faculty positions, funding high-quality research in clinical oncology, including veteran cancer research. Richburg was recognized for her project evaluating how sociobehavioral comorbidities and resource referral influence surgical outcomes in veterans with cancer.

Nalan Yurtsever, MD, assistant professor of laboratory medicine, is among the winners of a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Replication Prize. The award aims to advance reproducibility in biomedical research by recognizing strategies that make studies more reliable and replicable. Yurtsever and Imran Unal, MD, an endocrinologist at ChristianaCare, were selected for a Replication Ideas award. Their idea questions the validity of using HbA1c measurements for diagnosing diabetes across different laboratory platforms and patient populations.