Oct. 27, 2025 — Both science and ceramics are rooted in the idea that you’re going to fail.

One day, the wheel is your friend. You’re able to mold the clay into something beautiful and balanced. In the lab, your experiment is going as planned, producing meaningful data that support your hypothesis. The next day, it all collapses. You can’t center the clay. Your arms are tired. Your experiment fails, and you have a dozen new questions and no answers.

This ebb and flow is all part of the University of Florida graduate school journey for Cali Love, a first-generation college student, artist and Texan-turned-Gator who is pursuing the College of Medicine’s M.D.-Ph.D. program and exploring the intersection of cancer biology and neuroscience.

“On the wheel, clay becomes something more through persistence and vision,” said Love, who earned bachelor’s degrees in neurobiology and English at Georgetown University. “In the lab and in the clinic, I strive for the same transformation, turning questions into discoveries and discoveries into treatments that may change patients’ futures.”

Love is on a team working to develop targeted therapies for glioblastoma, a devastating brain cancer with no cure.

She is part of the third two-year cohort of UF Health Cancer Center’s highly competitive Team-Based Interdisciplinary Cancer Research Training Program, or TICaRT, — the only National Institutes of Health– and National Cancer Institute-funded T32 training program of its kind in the country.

“One of the big challenges is that glioblastoma doesn’t have a known target,” said Catherine Flores, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Lillian S. Wells Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Florida, and one of Love’s mentors and principal investigators in the Preston A. Wells Jr. Center for Brain Tumor Therapy. “After decades of research, we haven’t quite figured out how to target these tumor cells specifically.”

Love is tackling this problem with a unique approach: How can we harness neurodevelopmental cell types to create targeted cancer therapies?

In glioblastoma tumors, she said, there is a surplus of radial glial cells, normally only found during human fetal development. These cells act like a little fire pole, sending projections out that allow other cells to travel along them and expand the developing brain. Once development is done, the cells become normal neurons.

It’s unclear why these cells show up in brain tumors. Some scientists hypothesize that radial glial cells could be early stem cells that later become cancer, or they may be a potent tool for brain development but bad when co-opted for cancer spread.

Using the body’s normal immune system response, Love is developing a novel immunotherapy that kills the radial glial-like cells in glioblastomas, stopping their spread and breaking down the tumors. To do this, she trains polyclonal T cells, little fighters that serve as the body’s defenders against infections and disease.

T cells have long been used to create personalized treatments for patients, but most can only recognize and attack one thing, like a specific individual’s tumor cells or a unique protein. Love is attempting to train polyclonal T cells to recognize different expressions of radial glial cells, with the goal of helping multiple patients — not just one at a time — and even expanding beyond glioblastoma to offer hope for curing other cancers.

“My hope with this therapy is that because I’m targeting something that’s so integral to the tumorigenesis, it will work in different individuals and actually prevent further tumor formation outside of the classic standard of care,” she said.

Along with Tia Monjure, a predoctoral biomedical engineering fellow in UF’s Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering and the TICaRT program, Love is testing the immunotherapy using 3D bioprinting. This allows the researchers to take a small tumor sample, grow it in the lab and use dye colors to visualize how well the T cell therapy works with a 72-hour time lapse. It’s an incredibly useful test to see what targets the glioblastoma sample best before administering the treatment to patients.

“It’s a really powerful tool,” Love said. “With a lot of therapies, if it works, we don’t know why. But in this case, you can actually directly see, and I think that’s really important.”

Growing up in Bandera and San Antonio, Texas, Love always found school to be her safe place. Her mom was an artist; her dad was a chef. Their family was in and out of poverty, and it was thanks to the community around them, including neighbors, friends and caring, dedicated teachers, that she thrived in her studies.

For college, she found a second community in Washington, D.C., with the Georgetown Scholars Program, a cohort that helps first-generation and low-income Georgetown University students navigate the world of higher education with mentorship, financial aid and well-being resources. She worked in a research lab and immersed herself in experimental design, creative writing and a genuine curiosity about the world.

During her first two years of college, she attended summer intensive science programs at the University of Minnesota and the University of Michigan, solidifying her interest in the discipline and getting a taste of what a research career is like. By her senior year, she was president of the Georgetown Scholars Program.

When it came time to apply for graduate school, she knew she needed to find another place where community was everything.

“I wanted to make sure I was able to engage socially in science on a person-to-person level, on a community-building level, and also dive deep into and think critically about the things I care about,” she said. “UF just felt like home, like maybe I could grow roots here.”

The UF M.D.-Ph.D. Training Program is a small, family-oriented community that accepts eight scholars each year. Its size was a selling point for Love, who sought an academic home where students are seen as humans first and get holistic support.

She found it first under the mentorship of Kristianna Fredenburg, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor of pathology at the UF College of Medicine and one of the program’s four directors.

Affectionately known as “mom’s office,” Fredenburg’s desk was a place where Love could troubleshoot any problem and open up about the imposter syndrome that sometimes plagued her.

When she started medical school at UF, it felt like everyone had a different definition of success than she did as a first-generation student and artist. Love could be just as happy spending her days sketching intricate colored-pencil portraits and flexing her creative brain as she could be caring for patients as a well-trained, well-paid physician.

“I was floating, having an existential crisis, like “Oh, I just stepped on each of these stepping stones and now I’m here,’” she said. “How many times did I question, ‘What am I doing? Where am I? Am I supposed to be here?’ Dr. Fredenburg reconnected me with being true to myself and focusing on the day-to-day.”

Over Love’s first two years in the program, she and Fredenburg met monthly, discussing everything from her grueling classes to the pottery studio she joined to their families and favorite shows. They bonded like two old souls, familiar and comfortable on a foundation of trust and shared life experiences.

“I didn’t have a lot growing up, and she didn’t either,” Fredenburg said. “That brings a grit, a real fight, and she has that. She’s very inquisitive. With her science, she’s going to figure it out, or she’s going to try because the next thing leads to another question that leads to another question that leads to another, and she wants to answer it.

“To me, that is the hallmark of a great scientist.”

When Love began work on her doctoral dissertation in the Brain Tumor Immunotherapy Program, Flores became her primary research mentor. They’ve worked together for three years, passing many personal and professional milestones, side-by-side.

“I feel like Dr. Flores and Dr. Fredenburg are my actual moms,” Love said. “A huge part of science is mentoring and being mentored. I owe everything to them, to the people who decided to take a chance on me, and for all the time and resources they poured into me.”

In a full-circle moment in June, she shared that support with high schoolers in the UF Student Science Training Program, a seven-week residential research program for rising seniors considering careers in science, medicine, math, computer science or engineering. Love stepped into the role of teacher and mentor to lead a class with Monjure on how to model the mind.

This fall, she will present her work at three conferences: the European Association of Neuro-Oncology meeting in Prague, the European Association for Cancer Research cancer neuroscience conference in Bilbao, Spain, and the Society for Neuro-Oncology annual meeting in Honolulu.

“Cali feels deeply, and she has that genuine drive to help people,” Flores said. “It’s been very rewarding watching her grow as a person inside and outside the lab.”