Sakina Elzebair Eltom

After a professional degree in Veterinary Medicine from University of Khartoum (UofK), I came to the U.S. in the mid-Eighties on a Sudan Government scholarship for higher education with the stipulation to go back to teach at the UofK. To that end, I received a Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Pharmacology/ Toxicology from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Right within my first year of scholarship the irregularity in payment of tuition fees and stipend by the government forced Cornell University to pick me and put me on a scholarship.   I finished my studies at the end of 1989, However, because of the chaos in the system following Bashir’s regime’, the UofK higher education authority failed to do the logistics to bring me back and I was left stranded for a while.  I managed to land an opportunity for a postdoctoral training at the prestigious McArdle laboratory for Cancer Research in Madison Wisconsin, investigating the molecular mechanisms of chemical carcinogenesis. I followed that with a short venture working in a Biotechnology Company in Upstate NY (Paracelsian, Inc.) for two years, I then returned to academia and was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at the Environmental Toxicology Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison. I was then appointed as an Assistant Scientist (Non-tenure faculty track) in the Department of Pharmacology, University of Wisconsin-Medical School, at Madison, where I started my research on the pathogenesis of breast cancer. I joined Meharry Medical College in Nashville, TN as an Assistant Professor (Tenure-track) and I rose in the rank where am currently a Professor of Pharmacology & Cancer Biology at Meharry Medical College, and am a member of the Vanderbilt-Ingram Comprehensive Cancer Center in Nashville, Tennessee.  I also serve as the Executive Director for the Center for Women’s Health Research at Meharry Medical College.  Over the last two decades, I served as an expert consultant on several scientific peer review panels at the National Institute of Health, Department of Defense-Breast Cancer Program and Philip Morris External Research Program. I have authored many scientific Publications on my research on breast cancer and I served on many national advisory committees on higher education, training and research. In my laboratory, I trained many PhD students (mainly minority African American), where many of them are currently leading successful careers in academia as professors and experts at FDA and NIH and cancer research center. My laboratory is still leading active research on the role of environmental chemical exposure in the pathogenesis of breast cancer and other diseases in African and African American women.