I first wanted to get into cancer research when I was 14 years old. My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer at the time, and I had just started high school. My older brother was off at college, and my father doesn’t live with my family so it was basically my mother and I. It was a crash course in learning how to quickly grow up; I was just a freshman in high school and I had to take care of my mom and take care of myself.
Seeing my mom go through chemotherapy and what it did to her body set me on path from just liking science in general to wanting to actually do something about this field. I never set out to do brain cancer — I wanted to do breast cancer. But one thing led to another and here I am.