Oncologist brings social justice-focused lab with her to new position
As she moves to an assistant professor position at Harvard Medical School and a new leadership role, Narjust Duma, MD, continues her work to improve equity for both patients with cancer and women in medicine.
Healio spoke with Duma for the first installment in Women in Oncology’s “Women on the Move” series.
“As associate director of the Center for Cancer Equity and Engagement at the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, my goal is to develop programs to improve access for minorities to the cancer center and to the clinical trials and develop long-lasting relationships with the Latinx community in Boston,” Duma told Healio. “The Dana-Farber portfolio includes hundreds of clinical trials that could be the best option for many patients.”
Duma, who also is a HemOnc Today Next Gen Innovator, said the main objective of her move from University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center to Harvard’s programs was to further expand the Duma Lab, a team she leads with a focus on social justice in medicine and lung cancer in women.
“Our lab’s nickname is the Social Justice League,” she said. “The majority of the work is on social justice because there are so many inequalities in cancer care and for women in medicine in general. We focus on finding interventions to address those inequalities and move the field forward.”
The team has 25 members and includes two medical students during the summer. It started as an all-female team but now includes three men.
“We’ve submitted nine abstracts to ASCO, so we are quite a productive lab that, by a majority, is composed of underrepresented groups in medicine, such as women of color who also represent different career phases and geographical locations,” Duma said.
In addition, the lab published 10 papers last year and has had three papers accepted for publication since the start of 2021.
“I think the biggest challenge I have in oncology is that my pathway is not traditional, and so the work the lab produces doesn’t always get the recognition it deserves,” Duma said. “The unique aspect of my lab is that we don’t work with pipettes or petri dishes. We focus on social justice issues. That ranges from sexual harassment to discrimination of first-generation medical students,” she said.
The lab has “achieved the same milestones as a traditional lab,” Duma said, including publications and presentations. She also noted that all the pre-med students who worked in the lab have been accepted to medical school, and residents have been regularly matched with their preferred fellowships, “with an incredible success rate.”
One early concern Duma had was in naming the lab after herself, as she did not want it to feel as if the women on the team “belonged to her.”
However, as the team developed its portfolio, she felt it became important to refer to the group as a lab so that it would receive the recognition that often eluded their unique focus.
“We created the hashtag #dumalab for social media, and we started writing grants and papers in which we acknowledge the lab,” Duma said. “You believe that if you work hard, get published, get grants and present at meetings, you will get recognition, but because we do things that are outside of the traditional pathway for oncology, it’s been harder. We are now seeing more of that recognition.”
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