Every year, the Gerstner Sloan Kettering (GSK) Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences awards fellowships to two third-year students and six second-year students based on academic excellence. Student stipends at GSK are supported by a variety of sources, including philanthropic fellowships.
Grayer Fellows
Third-year students Kevin Boehm and Shengyu Gao have been named the 2020-21 Grayer Fellows. The fellowships were established by Mr. Jonathan Grayer, a member of Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Boards of Overseers and Managers, and Chairman and CEO of Weld North, an investment company. The Grayer Fellows are selected based on achieved excellence, as demonstrated by their thesis proposal examinations.
Olayan Fellow
Troy M. Robinson
Second-year student Troy M. Robinson has been selected as the 2020-21 Olayan Fellow. The fellowship, which supports the stipend of a GSK graduate student for one year, was established by The Olayan Group, a multinational corporation of more than 50 companies and affiliated businesses. The company’s Vice Chair, Hutham Olayan, serves on Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Boards of Overseers and Managers.
Robert B. Catell Fellow
Hyunu Kim
Second-year student Hyunu Kim has been named the 2020-21 Robert B. Catell Fellow. Established by Robert Catell, the fellowship grew out of his commitment to advancing cancer research. It supports the stipend of a GSK graduate student for one year. Mr. Catell is the former Chairman and CEO of KeySpan and chairs the advisory boards for the Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center at Stony Brook University and the New York State Smart Grid Consortium. In addition, he chairs the advisory councils of the New York Energy Policy Institute and the New York State Foundation for Science, Technology and Innovation. Mr. Catell also serves on the boards of the Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies, the New York Academy of Sciences, and Tomorrow’s Hope Foundation, among others.
Palestin Fellow
Dingyu Liu
Second-year student Dingyu Liu has been awarded the 2020-21 Beatrice P. K. Palestin Fellowship. The fellowship was established in 2006 by the family of Beatrice Palestin to support the stipend of a GSK graduate student for one year. Mrs. Palestin was a New York philanthropist with a longtime interest in cancer research.
Geoffrey Beene Graduate Student Fellows
Three second-year students — Ines Fernandez Maestre, Minh N. Nguyen, and Sarah C. Perlee — each received a Geoffrey Beene Graduate Student Fellowship. Recipients are selected at the end of their first year of study based on academic excellence. By providing support for outstanding GSK students, the Beene Fellowships are designed to expand the pool of investigators trained to pursue research in the highly complex and multidisciplinary field of cancer biology.
