The American Cancer Society (ACS) has awarded a $20,000 scholarship to Sandra Camarota, a student in Neumann’s graduate nursing program.

A survivorship nurse navigator with Penn Medicine Chester County, Camarota is working to develop the competencies needed to provide comprehensive, holistic, culturally sensitive cancer care to survivors as they transition from active treatment into survivorship. Camarota’s current graduate program will provide her with the curriculum and experience necessary to practice as an Adult Gerontology Primary Care Nurse Practitioner with an emphasis in providing care to the cancer survivor. 

The scholarship will allow Camarota to achieve this goal as she works to develop an evidence-based, multidisciplinary survivorship program with other experts dedicated to the needs of their cancer survivors. Survivorship care will further her objective to facilitate the transition from cancer patient to cancer survivor, allowing all such individuals to live well and live fully. 

According to Dr. Mary Powell, director of the graduate nursing program at Neumann,
"Sandy's work will make an important contribution to population health as cancer is now considered a chronic illness with more than 14 million survivors.”

The ACS is the largest non-government, not-for-profit funding source of cancer research in the United States. Camarota’s scholarship was among 100 national research and training grants (totaling more than $45.6 million) that ACS awarded in the first of two grant cycles for 2015. The grants will fund investigators at 63 institutions across the United States.

Since 1946, the ACS has funded research and training of health professionals to investigate the causes, prevention, and early detection of cancer, as well as new treatments, cancer survivorship, and end of life support for patients and their families.  In those nearly 70 years, the American Cancer Society’s extramural research grants program has devoted more than $4 billion to cancer research and has funded 47 researchers who have won the Nobel Prize.