ABOVE: © Harold Lee
Miller Photography
After graduating from Swarthmore College, Laura Bowers considered going to law school—until she worked in a law firm and realized it wasn’t for her. Instead, she earned her dietitian license and worked as a clinical dietitian for four years. But Bowers found herself increasingly interested in “understanding how different nutrients and diet patterns affected disease risk,” she says. She started a PhD in nutritional sciences at the University of Texas at Austin in 2009.
Something clicked soon after Bowers started a rotation in the lab of oncology researcher Linda deGraffenried. There, she says, she “fell in love” with deGraffenried’s research on the influence of obesity on breast and prostate cancers. “I just found that very fascinating, that nutrition can really play a big role in cancer risk as well as response to treatment.” To study obesity’s effects, Bowers validated and started using an in vitro ...
