ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2020
The Young Physician-Scientist Awards (YPSA) recognize physician-scientists who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable achievements in their research.
About the awardee
Nilay S. Sethi, MD, PhD, was born and raised in New Jersey and received his BS from The College of New Jersey, his MD from Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and his PhD in molecular biology from Princeton University. He then matriculated to the University of California, San Francisco for an internal medicine residency. Dr. Sethi returned to the east coast to complete his hematology and oncology fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where he remains as a medical oncologist. He splits his time between taking care of patients with gastrointestinal cancers in the clinic and investigating a subset of these cancers in the laboratory. He is particularly keen on better understanding how early genetic alterations engage environmental risk factors to promote premalignant gastrointestinal conditions. Most recently, he developed an integrative mouse model that combines p53 alterations with dietary carcinogen exposure to study gastric premalignancy. He has also established an avenue of research in colorectal cancer, defining a molecular circuit and stem cell program that is constitutively active in this prevalent malignancy. By leveraging data from patients, mouse models, and cell culture studies, he is motivated to provide an integrated understanding of early events in gastrointestinal cancers with the ultimate hope that the knowledge gained will inspire new avenues for cancer prevention and treatment.