Eastern Connecticut State University alumnus Justin Brown ’09 was awarded the prestigious Early-Investigator Award by the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) Office of Disease Prevention earlier this year for his innovative cancer prevention research. The award is made to an early-career prevention scientist who has made significant research contributions and is poised to become a leader in prevention research.
Brown is currently a research fellow in population sciences at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. The overarching mission of his research is to identify the biological pathways through which lifestyle factors – including physical activity, diet and body composition – influence cancer prognoses.
Consideration for the competitive Early-Investigator Award requires innovative and significant research accomplishments in applied prevention research, evidence of highly collaborative research projects, especially those that bridge disciplines to offer new approaches and ways of thinking in disease prevention research, and a track record of career advancement and evidence of leadership roles.
“It is an incredible honor for Justin to be recognized by the Office of Disease Prevention (ODP) as a 2017 Winner of the ODP Early Stage Investigator Award,” said Charles Chatterton, professor of kinesiology and physical education at Eastern. “We are all very proud of him and truly value the important, meaningful work he is doing. His dedication to this area of medicine inspires all of us.”
His research study, “A Phase II Randomized Clinic Trial to Evaluate the Dose-Response Effects of Exercise on Prognostic Biomarkers among Colon Cancer Survivors,” is among his publications in the area of cancer prevention. He has published more than 45 peer-reviewed papers in leading scientific journals, including the Journal of Clinical Oncology and the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, and is an editorial board member of BMC Cancer, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal that considers articles on all aspects of cancer research, including the pathophysiology, prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancers. In 2013, he received the citation award for authoring the most frequently cited paper in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.
Since receiving his bachelor’s degree in sport and leisure management from Eastern in 2009, Brown earned a master’s degree in kinesiology from the University of Connecticut and a Ph.D. in epidemiology from the University of Pennsylvania.
