Indian American physicians Dr. Sakthi Kumar and Dr. Shalini Vemuru have been named among the 2026 recipients of the Nell W. and William S. Elkin Fellowship and Chester P. Rochfort Scholarship at Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University.
The Elkin Fellowship and Rochfort Scholarship program supports physicians pursuing careers in cancer research and treatment. Dr. Kumar and Dr. Vemuru are among seven physicians selected for the 2026 awards.
Dr. Kumar’s clinical and research work includes hematologic malignancies, with recent research focusing on multiple myeloma. He was among researchers presenting work in 2026 examining outcomes for patients with newly diagnosed multiple myeloma carrying the high-risk del(17p) genetic abnormality. The research seeks to identify factors associated with outcomes in patients with this particularly challenging form of the disease.
Dr. Vemuru is a hematology and medical oncology fellow at Emory University School of Medicine and completed her internal medicine residency at Emory. She earned her medical degree from the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University. Her research has included breast and genitourinary cancers. Recent work examines outcomes among women with advanced HER2-low breast cancer and the use of artificial intelligence and radiomics to predict outcomes and guide treatment strategies for metastatic breast cancer. Earlier research examined genetic ancestry and tumor mutations in kidney cancer and treatment outcomes in metastatic prostate cancer.