The Lustgarten Foundation partnered with the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute to hold its annual International Women's Day Symposium on March 10th, 2026 at OHSU's Knight Cancer Research Building. Co-chaired by Lisa M. Coussens, PhD and Lustgarten's Chief Medical Advisor Elizabeth Jaffee, MD, The Power of Persistence–Women Transforming Cancer Research and Care brought together incredible women leaders who are driving progress, breaking barriers, and shaping the future of pancreatic cancer research and patient care. View the full program.

From groundbreaking science to powerful personal journeys, their stories remind us that persistence fuels progress—and change is possible because of it.

Watch the full symposium recording and be inspired by the voices leading the way.

Recent accolades and funding

Congratulations to Dr. Jonathan Brody who has received the notice of award for his R01 titled "Leveraging Hyperglycemia for the treatment of pancreatic cancer."

Dr. Teresa Zimmers has been invited to organize a plenary session at AACR's 2027 Annual Meeting titled "Novel Strategies in the Dual Treatment of cancer and cachexia." Congratulations!

Drs. Teresa Zimmers and Aaron Grossberg organized the Pancreatic Cancer Thriveship Community Conference on October 24. The Thriveship conference was a half-day gathering designed for patients, families, and caregivers to connect directly with doctors, researchers, and care providers in interactive sessions that offered practical guidance, mutual support, and real dialogue. Read more on OHSU Now.

Congratulations to Rohan Chaudhari, MD/PhD student in the Burger lab, who received a Frohnmayer Hicks Sciaretta Cancer Research Scholars Award and a Tartar Trust Fellowship!

The Wong lab has several announcements to share:

• Dr. Divya Ravi, postdoc in the lab, has received two awards:
  • Hopper Belmont Inspiration Award, a competitive national honor for research in pancreatic cancer, for exploring hybrid cells in peripheral blood as sensors of evolving disease burden in pancreatic cancer.
  • MRF-Early Clinical Investigator Award for examining age-induced stress on pancreatic cancer progression.
• Amanda Zucker, MD/PhD student in the lab, received the Mogan Fellowship.
• TJ Ekstrom, MD/PhD student in the lab, was awarded a training slot on the Integrated Training in Quantitative and Experimental Cancer Systems Biology T32 training program.
• The Wong lab was awarded a MPI R01 for their proposal titled “Regulation of intestinal stem cell proliferative state.”

The Moreau lab would like recognize Maryam Al-Ghezi's recent accolades:

• Maryam received a travel award to attend the Montagna Symposium on the Biology of Skin in October 2026, where she presented a flash talk and won the 1st place poster prize.
• Maryam also received a Frohnmayer Hicks Sciarretta Cancer Research Scholar Award.

Recent publications

The Enns lab has published "The neogenin-hemojuvelin axis in murine liver is crucial for hepcidin expression" in the American Journal of Physiology-Gastrointestinal and Liver Physiology.

Dr. Breanna Maniaci, one of our recent PhD graduates from the Maxson lab, has published as first-author "CSF3R compound mutations produce a hyperproliferative leukemia driven by overexpression of PIM kinases" in Blood.

Dr. Robert Eil and collaborator Dr. Rahul Roychoudhuri, University of Cambridge, published "Tumor-derived antioxidants suppress immunity by depriving T cells of reactive oxygen species" in Science. Drs. Eil and Roychoudhuri shared senior authorship on the publication, which identifies a new mechanism of tumor immune suppression.

Amanda Zucker, MD/PhD student in Wong lab, has had her paper accepted for publication in the Journal of Biomedical Optics.

Madison Hall, graduate student in the Braun lab, is first-author on the recent manuscript "Mutant ASXL1 Drives Transcriptional Activation and Repression in Human Hematopoiesis" 

Drs. Jonathan Brody, Kate Byrne, Aaron Grossberg, Teresa Zimmers, and Rosie Sears and members of their labs have published "Schedule-dependent efficacy of gemcitabine and RAS(ON) inhibition in orthotopic pancreatic cancer: implications for clinical trial design" in Cancer Letters. Intending for it to lead to a clinical trial that they are setting up here at OHSU.

The Byrne lab has co-published a paper with the Xia lab, along with Dr. Lisa Coussens and several other collaborators at OHSU, titled "IFN-γ-dependent tumor-cell MHC-II is restrained by MAPK signaling and associated with immunotherapy responsiveness in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma” in Cancer Immunology Research. 

Dr. Miffy Guo, one of our PhD graduates who successfully defended earlier this year, led a collaborative study with Drs. Robert Eil and Jonathan Brody, among other colleagues at OHSU leading to her first-author publication "The Posttranscriptional Regulator HuR Promotes Immune Evasion in Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma" in Cancer Immunology Research.

View all CDCB news and recognitions.