Dr Grant's Advice for Early-Career Oncologists at WCLC 2026

Afterwards, give them your contact info or ask for their contact info and follow up — follow up for any questions or career advising that you may have. You may unexpectedly find a mentor who could change your life just through one conversation.

Chris Grant, MD, a hematology-oncology fellow at the University of California, San Diego, discussed how early-career oncologists can navigate large single-disease meetings, identify mentors, and develop research questions during fellowship.

At the 2026 IASLC World Conference on Lung Cancer (WCLC), Grant said the scale of a meeting devoted to a single disease makes advance planning necessary. He recommended prioritizing plenary and presidential sessions, then skimming the oral abstract list beforehand to flag presentations relevant to a trainee's own research or to topics outside their existing knowledge. Because sessions are recorded, he noted, trainees can review what they miss rather than attempting to attend everything.

Networking, Grant said, is largely a matter of conversation. He characterized the lung cancer community as collaborative and described poster walks — approaching presenters and asking specific questions about their research — as the most direct way to build connections. He cited his own experience: while writing a review article on neoadjuvant therapy, conversations with specialists and poster presenters led to introductions at UCSD, where he now trains.

Grant framed conferences as a form of informal peer review. Approaching a presenter with a question, he said, produces feedback on a research idea that is difficult to obtain elsewhere. For generating those ideas, he advised reading the discussion sections of review articles to identify stated gaps in knowledge, then tracing how the literature has addressed them.

On selecting mentors, Grant said availability and collaborative fit matter more than seniority, citing his work with Lyudmila Bazhenova, MD, at UCSD. He added that mentorship needs and career priorities shift over time, and advised trainees to stay flexible.

Among the WCLC data he was most interested in, Grant pointed to the DLL3-directed CAR T-cell studies, particularly lymphodepletion regimens, duration of response, and markers of T-cell persistence and exhaustion.