ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2020

Kelly Bolton, MD, PhD was born in Los Angeles and pursued her undergraduate training at Cornell. She matriculated to the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. In between her second and third years of medical school she was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute research scholar at the National Institutes of Health. She pursued PhD studies in the genetic epidemiology of breast and ovarian cancer at the University of Cambridge under the mentorship of Drs. Paul Pharoah and Stephen Chanock. She completed residency in internal medicine at NYP-Weill Cornell Medical College and fellowship in medical oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, mentored by Ross Levine and Elli Papaemmanuil. During fellowship, she performed a large-scale epidemiologic investigation into how environmental factors shape the evolution of clonal hematopoiesis in cancer patients. Her research has resulted in several first author publications in high-profile journals including Nature Genetics, JCO and JAMA. She is the PI of several research grants including those sponsored by the National Cancer Institute (K08), the American Society of Hematology and the EvansMDS foundation. Her non-working hours are all devoted to her husband, Jesse, and their two sons, Cort and Max, ages two and four.