Michelle Monje is the Milan Gambhir Professor of Pediatric Neuro-Oncology at Stanford University, CA, USA, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. In March, 2025, she won the prestigious Lundbeck Foundation’s Brain Prize for co-pioneering the field of cancer neuroscience with Heidelberg University’s Frank Winkler. “Cancer neuroscience is a field that seeks to understand and therapeutically target interactions between the nervous system and cancer”, Monje explains. So “how the nervous system promotes or regulates the growth, invasion, and treatment resistance of a wide range of cancers…and then conversely, how cancers and their therapies influence the nervous system”.