Meet the 2023 Young SIOP awardees - Padma Sagarika Karri

Hi there! For the coming weeks, our blog will be dedicated to our Young SIOP Award winners!

Please meet Padma Sagarika Karri, YI from India, in their own words.


Hello, everyone. I’m Padma Sagarika Karri, a Fellow in Pediatric Oncology at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi. I hail from Vizag, the city of destiny, located on the east coast of India. I’ve completed my medical school training and residency in Pediatrics at Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research (JIPMER), Puducherry. It is here that I learned to use technical skill, scientific knowledge, and human understanding with courage, humility, and wisdom, in the care of the suffering. Evolving science, challenging patient care, multidisciplinary collaboration, and teamwork involved in Pediatric Oncology have led to my interest in the subject. Astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience (I'm an astronomy enthusiast and Carl Sagan fan), and I feel Pediatric Oncology does the same. The art of it is more intriguing than the science.  

It is said that the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members. It has been a privilege to have been trained at institutes that provide exemplary care, free of cost, to the socio-economically disadvantaged. I aspire to work at centers that focus on providing low-cost quality care to the socio-economically disadvantaged sections of the community. 

My research interests include the epidemiology of childhood cancer, quality improvement, and implementation science. I’d like to advance my knowledge in these areas of interest. Optimal utilization of available resources is crucial for the delivery of quality cancer care and more work needs to be done in our setting to achieve this.  I firmly believe in Doug Altman’s words – we need better research, research done for the right reasons.

I’m thankful to Foundation S - My Child Matters and Young SIOP Network for the scholarship. Our work on the feasibility of an oral-supportive care regimen during high-dose methotrexate administration in children with hematolymphoid malignancies has been selected for presentation at SIOP 2023. It would be a pleasure to attend my first SIOP annual conference and experience global collaboration for the improvement of the lives of children with cancer.

Onwards and Upwards!

Comments