How has your work changed over the course of the last year? s
Dr. Alison Allan Department Chair & Professor (Joint Appointment with Oncology)
“One of the projects that we have made a lot of progress with is related to the translational work that we're doing in collaboration with Dr. David Palma in radiation oncology. We have a phase three clinical trial looking at a very specific type of radiation called stereotactic ablative radiotherapy, which allows very precise targeting of metastatic disease. My lab is doing all the blood biomarker collection and analysis for that study. In terms of patient numbers, progress is occurring much faster than we anticipated, even despite COVID. We also recently just got a grant from the Canadian Cancer Society to do some more detailed downstream analysis of the biomarkers. We’re pretty excited.”
“Progress is occurring much faster than we anticipated, even despite COVID”
More about her research https://bit.ly/AllanLab Contact Info alison.allan@lhsc.on.ca (519) 611-2111 Ext. 84054
Generally, what does your day-to-day look like? “I am in a unique situation in that that my lab is located at the London Regional Cancer Program in Victoria hospital, but I have two offices because I am also Chair of the department. My day never looks the same, which is exciting and is one of the things I love about this job. I spend two to three days a week at the cancer center and then the rest of the week at the university. I also teach ACB 4461 and the biochemistry 4455 courses in the winter semester. This semester has been pretty crazy because I have to balance out all the research work with writing papers, meeting with students and staff, and sometimes doing a little bit of lab work myself (not often enough though!) Then there’s all the administrative pieces of being a chair. The department is actually coming up on an external review where we have to create a self-study report about what we've accomplished in the last five years, and where we are looking to go both on the education and the research side. It’s kind of three jobs right now, but it keeps me busy and it's really interesting.”
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