Navigating a non-traditional path to becoming a scientist

When you picture a graduate student, I’m probably not what comes directly to mind - I’m in my mid-forties and have enough grey hair to prove it. In 2024, I walked away from a 14-year career as a community college biology instructor to start the PhD program here at St Jude. I’m reimagining my professional identity and navigating a new career path which, for me, carries some risk and uncertainty. But now in my second academic year in the St. Jude Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, I’ve enjoyed working with my fellow students, despite our age gap, and have found in St. Jude a place to pursue the scientific questions that inspired me to shift directions in life.

In 2009 my wife was diagnosed with brain cancer. Like many of our patient families at St. Jude, we took a journey through the ups and downs of treatment, including resection, chemotherapy and radiation, eventually resulting in remission. However, 13 years later, her tumor came back. In that interim, much to our shock, treatment protocols had not changed. It was a gut punch as I watched physicians use the same methods from over a decade ago to treat her again. I thought, “How could brain cancer treatment have not advanced in all those years?” Unfortunately, this time treatment failed, and she died of her disease. But in this personal tragedy, I gained a new purpose. 

A common mantra at this institution is “If not St. Jude, then who?” I had asked myself a similar question: “If not me, then who?” With acuity of purpose, I decided to quit my job and spend the rest of my professional life discovering new and more effective treatments for brain cancers. But returning to school to pursue a PhD was intimidating. The biggest challenge would be finding a place that could support my transition from teacher to researcher.

Finding a place to start again

My undergraduate and master’s degrees do not connect directly to biomedical research. I studied environmental studies and forest ecology, examining how disruptions in complex ecosystems affect their disparate parts. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where I loved spending time in old growth forests. A certain feeling of awe envelops you when you look up and see the massive, ancient trees that dwarf you in both size and age, sometimes by centuries. Something about it captured my passion when I was younger, and I sought to understand the complex interactions within the forest. I enjoyed thinking about how changes in the forest, such as habitat disturbances from logging or wildfires, could affect insect and plant communities, leading to my degree in forest ecology.

Surprisingly, I’ve found many similar concepts from ecology apply to the systems biology of cancer. In some cases, these are shared methods, like the statistical approaches I learned, including clustering analysis and other multivariate techniques. In other cases, things are indirectly parallel. Single-cell RNA sequencing looks at populations of hundreds of cell types in the context of their tissue. Ecology looks at hundreds of different species and how they respond to their environment. It has really opened my eyes to think about the tumor microenvironment as an ecosystem of cell populations and interacting components.

Though I geek-out thinking about the molecular and cellular details of science, I never lose track of my goal. As someone who has lost a loved one to a devastating disease, my perspective is perhaps different from that of many other scientists. I have served as a caregiver for my late wife and watched the deterioration firsthand that is wrought by brain cancer, needing to make difficult medical decisions routinely, just as many of our patients’ families do every day. In everything I choose to study at St. Jude, I think about how our research is going to benefit the patient and family experience by reducing their burdens, enabling them to live longer and improving their quality of life.

After a year of classes and rotations, I’ve joined the joint lab of Christopher Tinkle, MD, PhD, St. Jude Department of Radiation Oncology associate member, and Anang Shelat, PhD, St. Jude Lead Discovery Informatics Center director and Department of Chemical Biology & Therapeutics associate member. I am focusing on translational research, and they both support those efforts. By combining their expertise and mentorship, I hope to find something new in pediatric brain cancer treatments. My current project is looking at how to take existing treatments, such as radiation therapy and Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs and repurpose them to enhance the anti-cancer response. I want to find ways to use these methods to increase the chances of treatment success, such as creating a friendly environment for immunotherapies. While I’m still learning the laboratory techniques, I enjoy the challenge and feel compelled to make a difference.

Moving forward, propelled by purpose

I remain motivated by the memory of my late wife and the cancer which took so much from her during the last year of her life. Now that I’m at St. Jude, I’m also motivated by the patients and their families that I see on campus every day. Seeing them is inspiring and humbling, and to be honest, I sometimes get emotional, but it helps keep me grounded to push through the hard days and continue my pursuit of improving pediatric brain cancer treatment. 

I’m proud to have taken the first steps towards that goal, and to be a student in a professional home that supports my non-traditional path to becoming a brain cancer researcher.