05/28/2024
Congratulations to Dr. Kelsey Monson!!!!
🎓
What was the best part? I’m genuinely so proud of the work I’ve completed during my time at NYU. I am hopeful that my thesis work, which identified a genomic biomarker predicting response to immunotherapy treatments in melanoma, can meaningfully improve the lives of cancer patients by identifying which patients will benefit from specific immune checkpoint inhibition treatments.
What do you wish you had known? Some of the best advice I have gotten is to take feedback seriously but not personally. It can be very easy to feel your identity is tied to your research results (or lack thereof!). By separating my sense of self-worth from the success of my experiments, fellowship applications, manuscripts, etc., I could learn and grow from the feedback I received, rather than getting demoralized. But it took me many years to successfully implement this advice!
What did you like to do in NYC? I am a classically trained violinist, but during my PhD I had the opportunity to record and perform with Ghostbound, an atmospheric black metal band based out of Brooklyn.
What will you do now? I have an F99/K00 career development grant from the National Cancer Institute that funded me through the end of my PhD (the F99) into a postdoctoral position (the K00). The grant required me to change institutions for the K00, but I’m not going far – I am starting an immuno-oncology postdoc at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in July.
