The Ronnie Fehily Medal Award is in honour of Ronnie, who was 62 years of age, when in 2011 she was diagnosed with a stage 4 glioblastoma and sadly died three months later.
Suffice to say, Ronnie’s family, found it very difficult to access both the practical information and the emotional support they needed following Ronnie’s diagnosis and throughout her treatment. Following Ronnie’s passing her family came together and decided they were going to try and fill that gap, and in 2012 the Ronnie Fehily Foundation, also known as Brain Tumour Ireland was founded.
Brain Tumour Ireland has established the Ronnie Fehily Medal Award not only to honour the memory of Ronnie herself, but to honour her family for their tremendous work and dedication over the past almost 12 years to bring the charity to where it is today. Board directors will come and go, CEO’s will come and go but this award will ensure that the reason the charity was set up in the first place will never be forgotten.
We invited those at the earlier stages of their work in research to submit a 400 word abstract giving an overview of a brain tumour research project that they are involved in either currently or in the past, and to design this abstract in such a way as to be understood by a lay audience. It is worth noting that Ronnie herself was a pharmacist and spent most of her time on the other side of the counter, making sure people understood the medications that they were taking, and what they were taking them for etc. We like to think that Ronnie would approve of this award in her name.
The winner of the second Ronnie Fehily Medal Award was Ms Mai Alkurashi, a PhD student at University College Cork. Ms Alkurashi spoke on investigating a novel treatment for glioblastoma, an aggressive cancer for which standard treatment had changed very little in the past 20 years. Ms Alkurashi’s presentation described targeting the endosomal recycling pathway in glioblastoma to investigate new therapeutic approaches.
Naomi Roche, Ronnie’s daughter, awarded Ms Alkurashi with the medal during our annual research update evening, part of our 2024 Awareness Week.
A huge congratulations to Ms Alkurashi, and thank you to everyone who applied. We look forward to more submissions and continuing the Ronnie Fehily Medal Award next year.
