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Dr.
Jasti Rao grew up
on a farm in India,
an only child who
learned early on what hard work
was and how it was necessary to
achieve success.
That ethic has stuck with this
Ph.D. who rises every day at 3
a.m. and works well into each
evening. You won’t find him at
many civic club meetings unless
he’s the speaker and he doesn’t
have time to serve on boards of
not for profit agencies. Except for
when he gets the chance to work
in his garden during summer
months, his hobby is his work.
That work, however, could
someday mean more to the aver-
age Peorian as well as every hu-
man on the planet than the work
of all those boards put together.
Today Rao has a resume that
is 76 pages long, including a list-
ing of the 250-plus articles he’s
written for various journals, an
accounting of the times he has
reviewed research grant propos-
als for others as well as those he’s
written himself for the research
he and his team are doing at the
Cancer Research Center at the
University of Illinois College of
Medicine at Peoria.
There is no quit in him. That,
he acknowledges, is the secret to
the successes that have made him
known in the medical research
community worldwide. It ex-
tends into everything he does.
“I am persistent, hard working
and I never quit,” he said. “I take
everything I do as a challenge. I
even want to be the number one
garden grower.”
Rao’s global reputation was
one reason he was recruited to
Peoria a decade ago by Dr. Don-
ald Rager, now-retired regional
dean of the College of Medicine.
Rager had been directed by
the school’s board to develop a
research component, which it had
been lacking.
At the time Rao was teaching
and doing cancer research at the
University of Texas MD Ander-
son Cancer Center in Houston.
He came to Peoria to make a
presentation at UICOMP about
cancer research.
“Less than a month later I
got a call that I was going to be
recruited to do research here in
Peoria. So I came and met with
Dr. Rager. My wife asked me that
night if I thought it was serious
and I said that when I came here
to speak I talked with Dr. Rager
for only a few minutes. This time,
he spent the whole day with me
so I was sure they were serious,”
he said.
Rao said he was planning a
move anyway since he knew that
his position in Texas could never
grow into one of leadership. “So
I knew if the school here was
able to meet my needs I was very
interested,” he said.
Those needs included that he
be made head of the research
department, be given adequate
research facilities and the chance
to recruit top researchers to the
Peoria campus. He also wanted
the chance to research other
forms of cancer; before then he’d
worked almost exclusively on
brain tumors. While that work
made him known in research
circles around the world, “I
wanted to do more,” he said.
His needs met, including
enough of a budget to pay re-
searchers that he would recruit,
Rao set out to build what has
become a successful research
center.
Doing Research
To Save Lives
Dr. Jasti Rao speaks softly but wields
worldwide influence in cancer research
By Paul Gordon
Dr. Jasti Rao
30
thePeorian.com