Robert McCabe of Anchorage, Alaska, is a 15-year-old avid bowler, a fan of baseball and basketball, and a rising high school sophomore who hopes to be an engineer one day. He is also a pediatric cancer survivor, and most recently, a pediatric cancer researcher. This summer, he helped to sequence and analyze a tumor sample in the lab of the UC Santa Cruz Treehouse Childhood Cancer Initiative.
In late July, Robert joined his older sister, Molly (Cowell ’22, molecular, cellular and developmental biology), a junior researcher in Associate Professor of Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology Olena Vaske’s lab, on the UC Santa Cruz campus. Vaske leads the Treehouse Childhood Cancer Initiative with the goal of leveraging genomics to improve the outcomes for pediatric cancer patients. The siblings helped develop Treehouse’s ability to sequence tumor specimens at the Colligan Clinical Diagnostic Laboratory using the lab’s new DNA sequencer.
Source: A 15-year-old childhood cancer survivor becomes a cancer researcher
