As the Master of Gonville & Caius, and Director of the Cancer Research UK Children’s Brain Tumour Centre of Excellence, Professor Richard Gilbertson occupies two of Cambridge’s most demanding roles. Despite this, he found time to speak with me about his work balancing academic leadership and life-saving research.

How has your first term as the Master been?

I really enjoyed it, actually! It’s very different from the jobs I’ve done in the past. I’ve run cancer centres in the US and the UK, but when you’ve got a lot of very talented people all together in an academic pressure cooker, the issues you face are the same. It’s also nice to be dealing with not just a medical subject like cancer, but lots of different subjects.

What was the process of becoming Master like?

It began with Fellows asking me: “we’ll be looking for a new Master. Would you be interested in doing it?”, then I met with the President, and he said: “would you be interested in doing it?” I said “well, yeah, potentially!”

There was a series of quite intensive interviews with different groups. Housekeeping, fellowship – every possible facet of college you can imagine, you interviewed with. Then they shortlisted six or eight people, and it came down to be sort of like Dragons’ Den. There were 121 fellows, and you give a five-minute pitch, then they vote. The President rang me that evening and said I’d been elected!

It was very funny, because that was in June of 2024, but they can’t elect you any more than 6 months before the current Master steps down. So although I was elected in June, I had to wait another year before they elected me again. It’s a very weird process – there’s a whole year of thinking, “what happens if they say no?”!

“I watched a family go through the death of their child from a brain tumour, and it completely changed my life”

What’s your typical day like as the Master?

Well, there’s no typical day. I’m half time at the college, half time in my lab, although really, there’s no such thing as half time. You’re full time in every job you do.

If there was a typical day, I would usually spend mornings in my lab, meeting PhD students and postdocs, and doing research analysis. Then the other half of the day, I’d be in college, typically chairing the council meeting or another committee meeting. I also still do quite a lot for government and outside of Cambridge, so it depends on what else I’m doing outside of college. It’s very varied, which is really helpful.

What inspired you to start working on childhood brain cancer?

When I went to medical school in Newcastle, I knew I wanted to do hospital medicine, and I knew I wanted to do research, but I thought it would be some kind of adult specialty. Newcastle put medical students on the wards from week one, and I got randomly assigned to a children’s ward. I never thought I’d do paediatrics.

Then I was randomly assigned a patient. She was a little girl called Katie, who was dying of a brain tumour. And in my first two weeks on the ward, I watched a family go through the death of their child from a brain tumour, and it completely changed my life. She died of a disease called medulloblastoma, and I’ve worked on it ever since.

“You get joy out of seeing people being really successful”

What are the key questions your research is trying to answer?

I began my career thinking that cancer was completely abnormal. Then I went through the discipline of learning that childhood cancer is very, very similar to normal tissue. What this made me realise is that a lot of cancer is probably normal. It’s in the wrong place at the wrong time, but it’s still normal.

We know that one in two adults will get cancer, but when you’re talking about a phenomenon where one in two of the population gets something, is it right to call it abnormal? Is it actually normal? If it’s occurring as part of a normal process, your whole academic and intellectual approach to the disease is very different. So, how abnormal is cancer? That’s an important question.

What has been the most rewarding part of your career so far?

In terms of research, it’s been the joy of discovery, and bringing some clarity and understanding to a disease that’s devastating for families like Katie’s. Being able to be part of that, and to help develop treatments, is great.

In terms of running a cancer centre and a college, it’s been genuinely helping other people to be excellent in what they do, and to achieve their potential. It doesn’t matter if you don’t get the credit for it – just watching it happen is brilliant. You get joy out of seeing people being really successful, and that, for me, is almost more rewarding than your own success.