Career Enhancement Program

The central goal of the Career Enhancement Program (CEP) is to use the resources at MD Anderson to train exceptional young investigators who will reduce the morbidity and mortality from ovarian cancer by making advances in the early detection, prevention, and treatment of this disease. To achieve this goal, the SPORE CEP will provide two awards, each of $50,000 annually for up to two years, funded from the SPORE and matching funds from MD Anderson. The intent of each CEP award is to prepare the selected scientists to become international leaders in academic research relevant to ovarian cancer. We will achieve this through focused recruitment of promising young investigators. We will work in partnership with awardees to generate individualized development plan and provide them with outstanding clinical and laboratory mentors and a mentoring committee, formal course work, coaching in grant and paper writing, leadership training, attendance at national meetings, networking with ovarian cancer scholars and completing and publishing a translational ovarian cancer research program. Over the past two decades, the Ovarian Cancer SPORE CEP has developed the careers of 27 young investigators. In the first year of the original grant, three postdoctoral trainees received CEP awards, and of the 24 faculty members supported since 2000, all but two have remained in academic research and 13 are engaged predominantly in ovarian cancer research. Seventeen have achieved federal peer-reviewed funding and five additional awardees have received competitive foundation grants. Three awardees from our 2017-2021 funded cycle have received two Ovarian Cancer Research Alliance (OCRA) Awards, one CPRIT award, one R01, one R21, and one U01. Since the inception of the program in 1999, our CEP awardees have published over 1,100 peer-reviewed papers regarding ovarian cancer.