Changing the Cancer Equation

Dheeraj Pandey, M.S. ’98, came to Texas in 1997 with two suitcases and $900 in his pocket. The University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Computer Science gave him a life-changing fellowship to support his academic pursuits. “UTCS gave me everything — a passion for distributed systems, a lab in which I bumped into my wife online, an early career start and an everlasting love for Austin,” says Dheeraj. In a generous show of gratitude, he and his wife, Swapna, have given UT a gift that could change — and save — lives in Texas and around the world.

Dheeraj and Swapna Pandey have donated $10 million to support an innovative partnership between Dell Medical School, UT Austin’s Machine Learning Lab, and the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences. This interdisciplinary research collaboration is focused on developing new ways to treat cancer, a disease that nearly 40% of us will be diagnosed with at some point in our lives.

Saving lives through collaboration

In the last 50 years, clinical advances have substantially reduced the mortality rate for people with cancer, but new breakthroughs often require years of trial and error in the lab. UT Austin is uniquely positioned to advance computational oncology through the breadth and depth of expertise on campus in computational science, machine learning, and clinical and medical research. Developing algorithmic, mathematical and computational approaches will help model and predict cancer and create new tools so health care providers can make the best diagnoses and decisions.

“The biggest promise of computational oncology is personalized medicine,” says Dheeraj, “the ability for us to answer questions that save precious lives. More importantly, the field is attempting to break silos between physics, biology, and computing researchers who are fighting indefatigably against cancer.”

Gail Eckhardt, director of the Livestrong Cancer Institutes at Dell Medical School emphasizes the Pandeys’ important role in the future of cancer treatment. “Time is critical when treating cancer,” she says. “The Pandeys’ gift brings us that much closer to the day when clinicians and researchers can integrate patient data and computational methods to individualize therapy, thereby improving the lives of patients with cancer.”

Share Your Passion for Health Care

If you share the Pandeys’ dedication to enhancing health care, you can support UT programs, initiatives, research and services that are making a tangible difference in people’s wellbeing. Download your FREE resource, “7 Popular Ways to Advance Health Care,” today. For more information, contact the Gift and Estate Planning Team at 512-475-9632 or giftplan@austin.utexas.edu.