Islander heads to Harvard for cancer research

A P.E.I. man will soon be doing cancer research at Harvard University.

Justin Pater has been accepted as a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

The 31-year-old Montague, P.E.I., native is finishing up his PhD at Memorial in St. John's before heading to Boston in August.

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"When someone says, 'Yeah, I'm going to apply for Harvard,' it's like, 'OK, good luck with that.' It's the biggest place in the world," Patertold CBC's Island Morning.

"But I kind of shocked myself I ended up getting a position there, which is kind of flabbergasting honestly. The Mecca for research in the world, really."

Pater will be doing research into a specific kind of sarcoma and the genetic factors that drive cancer spread and progression. The hope is to develop new drug therapies to combat it.

He expects to be doing this research at Harvard for the next three years.

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