Since 1984, the prestigious Whitehead Fellows Program has enabled extraordinarily talented young scientists to launch independent labs right out of graduate school, instead of joining a senior researcher’s lab. The first Valhalla Foundation Fellow will be Tobiloba Oni, who joined the Institute in February as a Whitehead Fellow. Oni is a cell biologist whose graduate research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) focused on pancreatic cancer. At CSHL, he helped develop one of the first mouse and human organoid models of pancreatic cancer and then used those models to identify tumor-specific metabolic vulnerabilities and resistance pathways. He also generated antibodies to abnormal proteins on the cell-surface of tumor cells, which are now being used to develop more effective methods for detecting pancreatic cancer.
