Expertise - Curiosity - Passion

Hi, I'm Noah

It’s a pleasure to meet you

When Curiosity Met Cancer - Why I Do What I Do

I’d be willing to bet that we’re both here for similar reasons. Maybe a friend, maybe a neighbour, maybe it was family, but we all know someone who’s had to deal with cancer. For me, it was a long history of my friends’ parents and distant relatives. That was until high school.

I remember it as clear as day. My mom had gotten food poisoning earlier in the week. She had spent a couple of days in the hospital, a little longer than someone with food poisoning would typically stay. Before too long, her doctors suggested an abdominal X-Ray. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer has some of the lowest rates of survival, from 13 percent all the way down to 3 percent in later stages.

It was draining. You just have to sit there and watch; neither of you fully understands what’s happening. Between drugs and a scar nearly a foot long, I still didn’t fully grasp what she was dealing with. It was so frustrating. To add to that, it’s always the things we least understand that are the most daunting. But from frustration came curiosity. I wanted to know what cancer really was and how it worked.

I started trying to answer those questions when I got to university. Then, I learned that I could also answer new questions, questions no one had the answer to. Next, out of curiosity came passion, and now, fast-forward a few years, I’m still trying to figure it out. I spend my days in a lab trying to answer those questions with fascinating science. I want to answer new questions that advance cancer science and satiate my curiosity. But I also want to answer old questions; questions that can help people understand cancer a little better, to make it a little less daunting or if nothing else, maybe it’ll just scratch that curious itch.

Thank you for reading. Let’s make cancer make sense.