West ACS Fellowship
Kirk, West, Ph.D., is UAMS’ first recipient of the prestigious American Cancer Society’s three-year postdoctoral fellowship.
Only 18% of ACS fellowships are funded from a nationwide pool of applicants. The three-year fellowship will help fund West’s research on the role of LC8-TLK1/2 axis in the DNA repair pathway in the ACS-funded laboratory of his mentor, Justin Leung, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the College of Medicine’s Department of Radiation Oncology.
West is a graduate of Arkansas Tech University and completed his Ph.D. at UAMS in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 2018 under the mentorship of Alan Tackett, Ph.D. West is a native of Lamar, Arkansas.
“This prestigious award speaks volumes to the potential of Dr. West in cancer research and the cutting-edge research environment in Dr. Leung’s laboratory and the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute,” said Tackett, the Cancer Institute’s deputy director and director of the IDeA National Resource for Quantitative Proteomics at UAMS.