In Michelle Monje’s laboratory at Stanford, she showed me cancer cells taken from a young patient who had recently died. The cells were still alive and dividing. I had come to photograph the physician who had cared for the child and was now studying the disease that had taken that life.
It was December 2025. In her office, notes from parents lined the walls and children’s drawings sat beside papers and books. There were small ornaments shaped like dragonflies, birds, and butterflies. Michelle told me that some bereaved parents come to see these creatures as signs of their children, a brief feeling that they are still nearby.
Michelle is a neurologist and neuroscientist whose research focuses on aggressive brain cancers, particularly those affecting children. I also photographed her alongside her husband, the Stanford psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and 2026 Nobel laureate Karl Deisseroth, who investigates the brain’s circuitry. In her own laboratory, Michelle has revealed how that circuitry can become involved in cancer: the activity of healthy neurons can help a tumor grow.
In 2015, Michelle and her colleagues showed that stimulating neurons accelerated the growth of human glioma cells implanted in mice. They identified a protein released in response to neural activity, neuroligin-3, that encouraged the cancer cells to divide.
Then, in 2019, her team demonstrated that glioma cells could form working synapses with neurons. These are the junctions through which nerve cells communicate. The tumors were receiving signals through connections of the kind used by the healthy brain. Cancer had become electrically integrated into the tissue it was invading.
That discovery opened a new way to think about treatment. Could researchers interrupt the signals helping a tumor grow? Blocking this communication slowed glioma growth in mice. Finding ways to do that safely in children remains a central part of her work.
Michelle has also helped bring a different approach into clinical trials. With Stanford immunotherapy researcher Crystal Mackall and their colleagues, she tested patients’ own immune cells, engineered to recognize a marker on these aggressive brain tumors. Results published in 2024 showed neurological improvement in nine of eleven treated patients. One patient’s tumor disappeared on scans, with a complete response still ongoing more than thirty months after enrollment. The treatment carried serious risks, including inflammation requiring intensive monitoring and treatment. These were early results, but they showed that tumors long resistant to treatment could respond.
Michelle told me that some families come to the laboratory to visit their children’s cells. They are the only things left alive from their children. The parents want to be near them.
She spoke about these visits with deep feeling. The bond formed while caring for a child did not end when treatment failed. Parents continued to write, to visit, to leave small tokens of their children’s lives with her.
By the end of our time together, both of us were in tears. The dragonflies in her office belonged to the same work as the cells in her laboratory. They had come from families whose children she could not save, and who still trusted her to keep trying.
