PHILADELPHIA (May 2, 2025) — Adria Hasan, PhD, a postdoctoral associate at Fox Chase Cancer Center, was recently honored with the American Association for Cancer Research’s (AACR) John Kincade Scholarship Fund Scholar-in-Training Award.
This award recognizes outstanding young investigators presenting seminal research at the AACR Annual Meeting. Funds support the scholars’ attendance and presentations at the meeting, granting them experience and exposure as they build their careers.
“I am thrilled to be honored with this award. It provides a significant platform to present my research,” said Hasan. “Receiving this award not only validates the importance of my work but also invigorates my drive to develop innovative solutions in precision oncology.”
Hasan is currently a postdoctoral associate in the laboratory of Sanjeevani Arora, PhD, an Assistant Professor in the Cancer Prevention and Control Research Program at Fox Chase, where she focuses on understanding how innate genetic variation in DNA repair impacts a patient’s response to DNA-damaging treatments like chemoradiation therapy.
She was selected for the award based on research that characterizes the molecular structure and function of a single nucleotide polymorphism, a variation in a single DNA building block, in the enzyme KDM3C, which plays a role in DNA repair. Hasan and her fellow researchers have found that the genetic variant is associated with the effectiveness of neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy for patients with rectal cancer and head and neck cancers.
Prior to joining Fox Chase in 2022, Hasan completed her doctorate in biotechnology at Integral University in Lucknow, India. During her studies there, she worked as a research fellow in the Department of Bioengineering, investigating the role of Hsp90 inhibition on the crosstalk between apoptosis and autophagy in lung cancer cells. She also holds a master’s and bachelor’s degree in biotechnology from Integral University.
Hasan presented the study, “Characterizing the Role of a KDM3C Germline Polymorphism in Chemoradiotherapy Outcomes for Rectal and Head and Neck Cancers,” on which she is the first author, at the 2025 AACR Annual Meeting, which was held in Chicago April 25–30.