A baseball helped Jordan discover her commitment to cancer research

For second-year PhD student Jordan Bondrowski, the drive to make a difference in cancer research began long before she picked up a pipet. It started at a Philadelphia Phillies game when she was 11 years old. In a rare moment, the Phillies broadcaster caught the ball while calling the play on air, then tossed it back to the field to honor tradition. Bondrowski was lucky enough to end up with the ball, but the next day, her father heard on the radio that there was a $500 reward for the ball’s return.

Bondrowski returned the ball but didn’t keep the money – she donated it to breast cancer research. “Even a few hundred dollars felt like it could help cure cancer,” she recalled. It was this moment that solidified Bondrowski’s belief that she could play a role in supporting cancer research. That belief deepened when her aunt was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma. Bondrowski lost her aunt to cancer within months, and the experience revealed to her that cancer affects an entire family, not just the patient. She knew she wanted to help prevent that loss for others.

High school coursework in chemistry and biology helped Bondrowski understand that she could contribute not only by fundraising, but through science itself. She went on to study at the University of Alabama, then her first experience at St. Jude: the Pediatric Oncology Education (POE) program. It was in that environment — surrounded by scientific curiosity and patient-centered purpose — that she felt her commitment crystallize. She knew then that she wanted to devote her life to cancer research.

St. Jude felt like the natural place to pursue doctoral training. Now, as a PhD student in the St. Jude Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, Bondrowski is part of the laboratory of Kiel Neumann, PhD, in the Department of Radiology. The Neumann lab focuses on utilizing radiopharmaceuticals for the treatment of children with cancer. Radiopharmaceuticals are medicines that contain radioactive particles, allowing them to be tracked in the body and providing insight into how medicines work. Bondrowski hopes that by applying this approach to chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy, she can use positron emission tomography (PET) to track engineered CAR T-cells as they move through the body, engage, and interact with cancerous cells.This research may provide insight into why certain CAR T-cell therapies are effective in some cancers and less so in others.

No matter what comes next, the purpose behind her work is clear. Every day, she walks through the halls of St. Jude and sees families holding onto hope. “That hope is what drives me,” she has said. “Being here reminds me that discovery matters because it has the power to change lives. I’m grateful that I get to be part of that — to learn, to contribute, and to work toward a future where fewer families share the memories mine does.”