04/10/18  Portland, Ore.

Mary Medysky, current PhD candidate, was awarded the American College of Sports Medicine-Gatorade Sports Science Institute Young Scholar Travel award.

About the Award
This travel award is to recognize outstanding professional achievements that foster the future of exercise science and sports medicine. It will be used to support attendance of ACSM's Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, MN by students in the fields of sports nutrition or exercise physiology.

What made you decide to apply for the award (s)? The ACSM conference is one of the most well-known and largest meetings in the exercise field. It offers an exceptional platform to further my research career through expanding my knowledge and understanding of cancer and exercise studies.

I also won the ACSM-Northwest chapter student travel award in February to attend the regional meeting in Bend, Ore.

Without financial support, attending conferences as a graduate student is extremely difficult.

How will you use the award? I will use the award to partially fund my trip to the conference, which takes place in Minneapolis, Minnesota (flights, accommodation, conference fees).

What does this mean for your research/work? Could you also tell us a little about your research/project? Successfully receiving a competitive award builds momentum for me to keep applying for more awards and grants to fund my work. The opportunity to present our team’s work at a major meeting in the exercise field is a wonderful opportunity to further my professional development. It allows me to improve my research dissemination skills in presenting and engaging in discussions with colleagues, both young investigators and well-established scientists, who provide me with valuable, critical feedback, each year that I attend this meeting. Broadly, my research focuses on assessing exercise to improve health outcomes in cancer survivorship. The project that I will present at ACSM is a three-arm randomized controlled trial comparing functional resistance, tai chi, and a flexibility training to improve physical function in breast cancer survivors, led by Dr. Kerri Winters-Stone and team. This project is a nice stepping-stone to my dissertation work, which will compare physical function and body composition in lung cancer survivors following treatment, with cancer-free controls to identify unfavorable health outcomes that signal for early intervention and rehabilitation. This project will also include a yoga program for lung cancer survivors and their partners of which I will instruct here at the SON.

Anything else you would like to add? I would like to thank my dissertation chair, Dr. Kerri Winters-Stone, for her unwavering support.