KCA’s Research Intern Outlines Grant Impact

This is a guest post by Liam Piscetelli, the KCA’s 2024 Research Intern.

For the past 8 months, I have interned with the KCA as a research intern. As a student working towards their Masters of Public Health with a concentration in Applied Epidemiology from the University of Arizona, this opportunity to work with the KCA proved to be valuable and life-changing. During my 8 months with the KCA, the projects I worked on included a Grant Program Impact Report and providing initial analysis and experience feedback using the KCA developing database created by XCures.

Helping to generate an Impact Report for the KCA was a unique and challenging experience for me that allowed me to test many of the skills I have been developing in school including data collection, cleaning, and analysis. Learning about all of the different grant awardees, including their research, was both inspiring and amazing and to learn about how much impact a smaller non-profit like the KCA can have on the field of kidney cancer research was incredible.

Through my research, I confirmed the KCA has awarded over $7 million in research funding since 1995 to over 70 researchers. The awardees have expanded over the years to include a variety of institutions both in the US and international as well as an increasing number of female researchers, reflecting the overall growth of the field. Importantly, I found nearly 100 publications that acknowledge KCA as a funding source since 2018 alone, underscoring the KCA’s impact as a driver of research progress.

I hope that my efforts in generating this report can be used to demonstrate to others what the KCA has done for the world of kidney cancer research and encourage more researchers to apply to the KCA yearly grant program.

Working with the KCA’s newly forming database created by XCures, an AI assisted Health Information Platform, was both eye-opening and exciting. I never had the experience of working with large, real world datasets so I am glad to have been able to gain such an experience. It allowed me to gain a better understanding of data cleaning and analysis, while creating more interest in the subject for me, leading me to seek other training in the subjects.

I would like to thank my KCA mentor, Dr. Salvatore La Rosa, Chief Scientific Officer, for his support, encouragement, and guidance while we worked on these projects together. I would not have gotten this far without him!

While my time at the KCA was short, it was an incredible privilege to work with such a kind and impactful organization. A non-profit such as this is truly a wonder to behold and I am grateful that I was able to provide some support to them in their mission to cure kidney cancer.