ABOVE: © KEN RICHARDSON PHOTOGRAPHY
When Cigall Kadoch was a teenager, a close family friend was diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer. As Kadoch processed the news, she became deeply frustrated. “I didn’t understand what cancer was, why it could possibly take someone’s life so quickly,” she says. That experience led her to learn more about cancer, starting in high school just north of San Francisco and throughout her undergraduate studies in molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her interest only grew, and she went on to study cancer biology as a graduate student at Stanford University in 2009.
“She walked into my lab one day,” says Gerald Crabtree, a pathologist at Stanford who became Kadoch’s PhD and postdoc advisor, and “she knew so much and was energetic . . . I was hugely impressed by her.” Crabtree studied vertebrate development and chromatin, the collection of DNA ...
