Meet the Founder
Aygün Şahin, M.Sc., Ph.D.
How and why Cancer Education and Research Institute (CERI) was born
Over the course of 10+ years working as a cancer scientist in several countries, Aygün Şahin, M.Sc., Ph.D., has noticed the lack of connection between cancer scientists and cancer patients.
Year after year, she received emails and phone calls from people all over the world, asking helplessly for information on their newborn son's brain cancer, grandmother's bone cancer, or mother's lung cancer. They were asking for guidance on research. It was heartbreaking to experience this while she worked in the lab relentlessly to find a cure for cancer.
One late night, while Dr. Şahin was working in the lab, she received a call from a friend whose mother was hospitalized for end-stage lung cancer at the research hospital where she was working. She visited her friend's mother every day after work until the day that she received a phone call from her friend that her mother passed away.
Dr. Şahin felt that something here was terribly wrong, something that didn't make sense at all; on her end, she was working on curing cancer while on the other end someone was dying from the disease.
Throughout her career, Dr. Şahin has been a mentor for students at every level. During her studies as a cancer scientist, she served as a judge at a science fair at a middle school in Massachusetts. She gets constant emails and calls from similar students all over the world who need guidance and direction for careers in cancer science. She believes we need more outstanding cancer scientists, and we need to develop them today and at younger ages!
All these experiences pressured Dr. Sahin to do something, and to do it NOW! So she followed her true passion on 1) cancer research, 2) education, and 3) helping people to build a nonprofit organization that aims to 1) educate people about cancer, 2) bridge the gap between cancer scientists and cancer patients, and 3) give cancer research scholarships to promising high school students worldwide.
She spent a year doing background research, reading law books, building websites, creating business plans, and talking with mentors, to found CERI, formerly Cancer Research Simplified, on strong and stable ground on January 30, 2013.
Learn more about Dr. Şahin’s background.
Over the course of 10+ years working as a cancer scientist in several countries, Aygün Şahin, M.Sc., Ph.D., has noticed the lack of connection between cancer scientists and cancer patients.
Year after year, she received emails and phone calls from people all over the world, asking helplessly for information on their newborn son's brain cancer, grandmother's bone cancer, or mother's lung cancer. They were asking for guidance on research. It was heartbreaking to experience this while she worked in the lab relentlessly to find a cure for cancer.
One late night, while Dr. Şahin was working in the lab, she received a call from a friend whose mother was hospitalized for end-stage lung cancer at the research hospital where she was working. She visited her friend's mother every day after work until the day that she received a phone call from her friend that her mother passed away.
Dr. Şahin felt that something here was terribly wrong, something that didn't make sense at all; on her end, she was working on curing cancer while on the other end someone was dying from the disease.
Throughout her career, Dr. Şahin has been a mentor for students at every level. During her studies as a cancer scientist, she served as a judge at a science fair at a middle school in Massachusetts. She gets constant emails and calls from similar students all over the world who need guidance and direction for careers in cancer science. She believes we need more outstanding cancer scientists, and we need to develop them today and at younger ages!
All these experiences pressured Dr. Sahin to do something, and to do it NOW! So she followed her true passion on 1) cancer research, 2) education, and 3) helping people to build a nonprofit organization that aims to 1) educate people about cancer, 2) bridge the gap between cancer scientists and cancer patients, and 3) give cancer research scholarships to promising high school students worldwide.
She spent a year doing background research, reading law books, building websites, creating business plans, and talking with mentors, to found CERI, formerly Cancer Research Simplified, on strong and stable ground on January 30, 2013.
Learn more about Dr. Şahin’s background.
