Colin Kenny, PhD, has won three major awards in recent months. But if you ask him what he is most proud of, he will tell you about the PhD students in his lab. 

At the PanAmerican Society for Pigment Cell Research (PASPCR) Meeting in Tampa this past March, Kenny was honored with the Medrano Young Investigator Award. Remarkably, at the same conference, every member of Kenny’s lab also came home with an award.  Three PhD students working in his group—Delaney Robinson, BA, MPH; Julius Yevdash, BS; and Sanjida Dorin, BS, MS—each submitted abstracts, were selected to present, and won $500 for their work.  

“All four of us returned home with awards,” said Kenny, an assistant professor with a secondary appointment in Internal Medicine and researcher at the HCCC. “Being an early careerfaculty member, it feels especially rewarding to see the people I mentor also win awards.” 

It was the second consecutive year his lab made that kind of mark at PASPCR. At the 2025 meeting in New York, two of his students also won awards, demonstrating the value Kenny places on mentorship. In fact, this conference has specifically played an important role in shaping his philosophy of mentorship. Kenny first attended the conference in 2019 in Bar Harbor, Maine, where he went through its mentorship program for early-career scientists. Drawn by this supportive environment, he returned after starting his faculty appointment at the University of Iowa in 2022, this time as a group leader. A year later, he brought his own lab to PAS-PCR for the first time. 

“Seeing my people go through the same mentorship program there and then being recognized for their work is an incredible feeling,” he said.  

Kenny’s arc from mentee to mentor within the same conference is part of what makes the Medrano Young Investigator Award such a significant milestone.  

Three awards, one throughline
The Medrano Young Investigator Award is among the most selective honors in pigment cell research. Offered every two years, it draws candidates from across North, Central, and South America, and a committee of five peers must unanimously select a recipient. The award is named after a pigment cell biologist who died tragically in a car accident while driving home from a melanoma research meeting. In her memory, the society has presented the award for several years to researchers who are making meaningful contributions to the field. Kenny shared that being selected by a committee of his own peers in melanoma and pigment cell research made the recognition especially memorable.  

This recognition came with an invitation to speak at the meeting, where Kenny discussed the future of melanoma research and presented an overview of his work. This is also when he had an opportunity to see his PhD students present.  

Kenny also earned the Melanoma Research Alliance (MRA) Grant, which supports a project he considers crucial to his field. This grant funds Kenny’s development of a zebrafish model of uveal melanoma, a rare and aggressive cancer of the eye. Uveal melanoma has a nearly 10% survival rate after metastasis, and 50% of patients experience liver spread, sometimes a decade after initial treatment. 

Kenny describes conversations with patients living with uveal melanoma who tell him they cannot sleep at night, never knowing whether a follow-up appointment will bring bad news. “’It’s like a sleeping thing in me,’” he recounted one patient saying, “and I want to know if it’s ever going to wake up.’” 

His lab’s zebrafish model is designed to address this uncertainty by identifying biomarkers. These biological signals could tell a clinician at the moment of observation whether a suspicious spot in the back of a patient’s eye is a benign mole or a melanoma. Currently, that determination often requires months of watchful waiting to see whether the lesion grows. Kenny said that this waiting is precisely when metastasis begins to take hold. 

Kenny earned his third award from the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust a bit differently from his MRA grant. Rather than responding to a specific proposal, the Carver Trust identified Kenny as an investigator with exceptional promise and invited him to describe his lab’s work. The funding that followed allowed him to launch a new line of research around a question that runs very deep: why does the location of a melanoma matter so much? 

Kenny explained that melanoma on the palm of the hand is far more aggressive than melanoma on the trunk. Meanwhile, melanoma inside the mouth—mucosal melanoma—is almostuniversally fatal, while melanoma on the outside of the cheek is highly survivable. The difference between inside and outside the same cheek can be the difference between life and death, and the reason lies in the tissue environment surrounding the tumor.  

The Carver Trust funding allows Kenny’s lab to systematically study micro-environmental interactions—exploring how tumors in the eye differ from those in the skin, and how different regions of the skin dictate tumor behavior in ways the field is only beginning to understand. 

Origins
Kenny came to melanoma research via an unlikely path, with his early training starting in pediatric brain cancer in Ireland. Then, his postdoctoral work focused on how zebrafish embryos produce melanocytes, the pigment-producing cells found throughout the human body. He began to see connections between that work and cancer after he started presenting at PASPCR and talking with clinicians at Iowa, including  Mo Milhem, MBBS,  and Elaine Binkley, MD, who helped him identify gaps in clinical knowledge.  

The deeper question that has driven him since the start of his career is one of biology’s more remarkable puzzles: every cell in the human body carries the same DNA, yet a skin cell becomes a skin cell, and an eye cell becomes an eye cell. Kenny said that cancer exploits that same flexibility by using the same genetic blueprint to grow, spread, and then evade the immune system in ways that scientists are still trying to decode. This problem, and the tools zebrafish offer for its investigation, are what brought Kenny to Iowa and what keep him there. He also wants his students to understand it the same way, which is why he brings them to PASPCR every year.   

“We study melanoma, but the origin of melanoma is the pigment cell, the melanocyte,” Kenny said. “This conference really focuses on melanocyte biology, and I want my students to understand that and not just the tumor. We need to understand the basic biology of the cell that gives rise to the cancer before it becomes cancerous.” 

Kenny’s belief that you cannot understand where something is going without first understanding its origins is what makes Kenny both an attentive scientist and an attentive mentor.