Trevor Royce and Sheetal Kircher have been selected for the American Society of Clinical Oncology Health Policy Fellowship Program.
Now entering its third year, the fellowship program offers oncologists the opportunity to gain the knowledge base, skills, and experience necessary to shape regulatory and legislative policies that directly affect the practice environment and impact patients with cancer and their care teams. The next ASCO health policy fellowship runs from July 1 to July 1, 2019.
Royce is chief resident at the Harvard Radiation Oncology Program and immediate past vice-chair of the Association of Residents in Radiation Oncology Executive Committee.
During medical school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, he spent a year as a Doris Duke Clinical Research Fellow conducting health services research with a focus on prostate cancer.
Royce attended the University of Virginia, where he studied biomedical engineering. Before medical school, he pursued graduate school at Georgetown University and completed an internship in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. During residency he obtained an MPH at the Harvard School of Public Health. He will join the faculty at UNC Chapel Hill this fall.
Kircher is a medical oncologist and assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at Northwestern University. She obtained her medical degree from the Rush Medical College and completed her fellowship in medical oncology at Northwestern University. During her research fellowship at the Ann Arbor Veterans Affairs, focusing on health services, she also obtained a master’s degree in Health and Health Outcomes from the University of Michigan.
Kircher’s clinical focus is the treatment of gastrointestinal malignancies and her research interests are related to health care delivery throughout the cancer continuum, including long-term survivorship and the impact of cancer treatment costs on patients, health systems, and payers. She currently serves as the medical director of the Survivorship Institute of Northwestern, where she oversees programmatic aspects of delivering survivorship care.
As ASCO health policy fellows, Royce and Kircher will participate in the following activities:
Active participation in policy development for high-impact issues in oncology,
Small-group teaching sessions delivered by ASCO professional staff and qualified volunteers,
Training in communication and leadership skills, as well as advocacy strategies, and
A mentored research project that advances an ASCO policy initiative.
The application period for next year’s Health Policy Fellowship opened July 1 and must be submitted online using ASCO’s Grants Portal.
ASCO conducts and administers the fellowship with funding support from the Conquer Cancer Foundation Mission Endowment.
