University of Kansas graduate student researcher takes aim at deadly br...(e to take something that's going to trea...)

The KU researcher knows well the suffering experienced by cancer patients. It's a motivating factor in making development of better cancer therapies the focus of her career.

"My grandfather died of leukemia when I was in junior high and he was very sick the last year of his life," Ciaccio said. "I think a lot of it was the treatment that was making him sick. And when he passed, he had been though so much pain and had lost so much weight that he didn't even look like himself anymore. So that started me thinking a long time ago that we have to be able to do better than this."

Already, Ciaccio's work with ATF5 is being funded and recognized for its significance. She received a prestigious Self Graduate Fellowship during her first year at KU.

"That's a unique program in that it's training graduate students to be leaders to effectively communicate and write and network and work on a team," Ciaccio said. "All of the training that you need to be an effective leader you can get through the Self Graduate Program. I don't know of any other universities that have that for graduate students. Most of their training is usually scientific training, but people tend to neglect the skills that you need to succeed in the real world in terms of communication and learning to be a leader."

Most recently, Ciaccio presented her work to Kansas lawmakers at the Graduate Student Research Summit in Topeka, after placing highly in the recent Graduate Research Competition held at KU.

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