Michelle Monje-Deisseroth works at the edge of medicine where hope and grief coexist in the same room. She is a physician and a scientist, trained in neurology and oncology, and her life’s work focuses on gliomas, aggressive brain cancers that often strike children. It is a field defined by urgency and loss, and she carries both with unusual steadiness.
When I photographed her in December 2025, we moved between her office and her lab at Stanford. In the lab, she showed me cancer cells taken from a young patient who had recently died. Those cells were still alive, still dividing, still teaching. They are the core of her work. By studying how neural activity influences tumor growth, Monje has helped overturn the long held belief that cancer is biologically isolated from the nervous system. Her research revealed that neurons can actively drive tumor progression, a discovery that reshaped the field and opened new therapeutic paths where none had existed.
This work is not abstract for her. She treats patients. She speaks with families. She watches children struggle, in a field where loss is still common. In her office, the science recedes and something quieter takes over. Notes from parents line the walls. Drawings from children sit beside papers and books. There are small ornaments shaped like dragonflies, birds, butterflies. She told me that many parents come to see these creatures as manifestations of their lost children, brief signs that they are still nearby in some form.
Some parents come to the lab itself. They want to be near the cells taken from their children, the only living pieces that remain. Monje speaks about this without drama, but not without feeling. She understands that for these families, the lab is not just a place of research. It is a place of connection.
Monje’s scientific rigor is matched by her emotional fluency. She does not separate the human cost from the biological problem. Her lab is known for technical excellence, but also for a culture that acknowledges grief rather than pretending it can be bracketed out. The questions she asks are precise and difficult. How does neural activity shape cancer. How can that interaction be interrupted. How do you slow a disease that moves faster than childhood itself.
By the end of our time together, both of us were in tears. Not because of despair, but because of proximity. To the families. To the children. To the reality that science, at its most meaningful, is an act of care carried out over years, sometimes decades, often without guarantees.
Michelle Monje-Deisseroth is building a new understanding of brain cancer from the inside out. She is doing it cell by cell, patient by patient, with a rare combination of intellectual clarity and moral gravity. Her work does not promise miracles. It offers something harder and more honest. Time. Understanding. And the possibility that fewer parents will have to leave notes behind.
