Rutendo Gambe was born and raised in Harare, Zimbabwe and has always been curious about how the body works and what makes some people healthy and others not. This curiosity led her to study neuroscience and women's and gender studies at Wellesley College. Her time at Wellesley also marked the start of her cancer research. She looked at how chemical signals in our body known as hormones can sometimes play a role in abnormal cell growth and lead to cancer. After she graduated, she moved on to study how mutations in specific genes can also lead to cancer! Her work was in a blood cancer known as chronic lymphocytic leukemia and she researched how different combinations of mutations in the machinery that makes proteins in our body can lead to this type of cancer. She is now in medical school in London and hopes to continue research as a doctor to better serve the patients she will see.
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