‘A Fabulous Person’: In Memory of Rich Folkers

A group of employees gathered this Earth Day for a brief ceremony to dedicate NCI Frederick’s Moon Tree and celebrate the spirit of scientific discovery. The campus’ Moon Tree is a sweetgum sapling. It was cultivated from a collection of seeds carried into lunar orbit aboard the Orion spacecraft during the 2022 Artemis I mission.

As the 1990s arrived, the Scientific Library at NCI Frederick was a day-and-night operation, a bustling nexus of information and resources. While the next 30 years would bring major changes to operations and resources alike, the library wouldn’t lose its stride.

Academic researchers, along with scientists at NCI Frederick, are repurposing a harmless bacterial virus to reactivate dormant HIV-infected T cells—a type of white blood cell—for destruction. Their proof-of-concept study, published in iScience, is an early step in testing this platform.

One year ago, the Poster staff and colleagues at NCI and Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research bid a heavy-hearted farewell to Rich Folkers, formerly the Poster senior editor and NCI Frederick communications manager. He passed away in April 2025 at the age of 65. One year has given us time to reflect on his life and legacy. Both made a difference to us.

Nadya Tarasova, Ph.D., clicked her mouse a few times, repositioning some letters and lines on her computer screen. The program on display looked like it could be Photoshop’s distant cousin, but even an uninitiated onlooker could’ve seen this wasn’t artwork. It was SLICE, one of the world’s first—and newest—chemistry coding programs to have a graphical interface.