Growing up in the San Francisco area, Cigall Kadoch, PhD, had a passion for puzzles. The daughter of a Moroccan-born, Israeli-raised father and a mother from Michigan who together developed an interior design business, Kadoch excelled in school and pretty much everything else. Above all, she loved to solve brain-teasers.

For Kadoch, the Rubik’s cube represents a love of puzzles, as well as the structure of the protein complexes she studies in her research at the Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center. Dana-Farber Chief of Staff Stephen Sallan, MD, describes her as “addicted to discovery.”

In high school, however, Kadoch came up against a problem that defied solution. Breast cancer took the life of a beloved family caretaker who had nurtured her interests in science and nature. She knew little about cancer except that it took lives far too early.

“I was deeply saddened and very frustrated at my lack of understanding of what had happened,” recalls Kadoch. “I thought to myself, cancer is a puzzle that isn’t solved, let alone even well-defined, and I want to try. As naïve a statement as that was, it was a defining moment—one which I never could have predicted would actually shape my life’s efforts.” …