Michelle Monje

Origins and early life

Michelle Monje grew up an only child, raised by her mother, Susan, an IBM programmer, first in Indiana and then, from the age of eight, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Writing for the Brain Prize, she says that her great-grandparents came to New York at the turn of the twentieth century to escape the pogroms in Eastern Europe, and that she attended kindergarten at the Jewish Community Center; her place here rests on that descent.

She graduated from Vassar College in 1998 and took a medical degree and a doctorate at Stanford in 2004, showing in her thesis how cranial radiation disrupts the making of new neurons.

Work and career

As a student she met her first child with diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, an inoperable brainstem cancer that no one was then studying, and she returned to Stanford after a neurology residency in Boston. In late 2008 the family of a five-year-old patient donated his tumour, and from it she grew the first cell culture and mouse model of the disease, now shared with hundreds of laboratories; she joined the faculty in 2011.

Her laboratory showed that the activity of neurons drives the growth of gliomas, through the protein neuroligin-3 and through working synapses with tumour cells, the root of a field she named cancer neuroscience. With Crystal Mackall she aimed CAR-T cells at a molecule on these tumours, and in their trial, reported in Nature in November 2024, nine of eleven treated patients improved and one boy's tumour vanished from his scans.

Recognition

She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine and named a MacArthur Fellow in 2021, won the Paul Marks Prize in 2023 and the Ross Prize in 2024, and in 2025 shared the Brain Prize with Frank Winkler and joined the National Academy of Sciences. She married the neuroscientist Karl Deisseroth in 2007 and they have four children; on 5 October 2026 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for optogenetics.