The Brown University Oncology Research Group — BrUOG — will throw its annual Food Truck Festival Oct. 22 to help raise funds to support its work in developing cancer treatments.
The Food Truck Festival is a free event open to Brown students and the Providence community at large. It will feature food from four different local food trucks: Friskie Fries, the Salad Man and Juice Bar, Sarcastic Sweets and Rhodies Food Truck. The festival will also feature performances by Oliver Hu ’18 and Corey Morrison ’19 in addition to Lainey Dionne, a local musician.
The festival aims to “increase awareness for the BrUOG,” said Kristen Mitchell, a clinical research coordinator with the group. Additionally, proceeds from the festival will go directly into funding the BrUOG’s research efforts.
BrUOG does work with Phase I oncology research. Through its collaborations with partner hospitals in the Providence area, the group develops new research practices from the ground up by developing protocol proposals, drafting submissions to the Food and Drug Administration and farming out practices to hospital sites where patients can receive those new treatments, Mitchell said.
The Food Truck Festival is student-run. BrUOG offers an internship every year in which one Brown student is able to work with the group to coordinate this event. The idea for the festival was conceived three years ago by Derek Shay ’16, the intern at that time. The festival is “a really interesting way to capture the Brown community,” Mitchell said.
It is important to raise awareness for BrUOG within Brown and neighboring communities, she added, given that it is a small and busy office that does not often have time to reach out to students and Providence citizens.
The event should be “huge,” Mitchell said, given its central location off Thayer in front of the Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts and its coinciding with Family Weekend. BrUOG expects a turnout of around 1,000 people and has been planning since the summer.
