Michelle Monje

Biosketch

Michelle Monje, MD, PhD, is the Milan Gambhir Professor of Pediatric Neuro-Oncology in the Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. She received her M.D. and Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Stanford in 2004 and completed her residency training in neurology at the Mass General Brigham program in 2008, followed by a clinical fellowship in pediatric neuro-oncology and postdoctoral fellowship training in developmental and cancer biology at Stanford. She joined the faculty at Stanford in 2011. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Neurology and member of the National Academy of Medicine and National Academy of Sciences. Her work has been recognized with numerous honors, including an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, the 2023 Paul Marks Prize, the 2023 Richard Lounsbery Award, the 2024 Ross Prize in Molecular Medicine, the 2025 Prize in Translational Neuroscience from the Max Planck Society, and the 2025 Brain Prize.

Research Interests

Dr. Monje’s research program focuses at the intersection of neuroscience, immunology and brain cancer biology with an emphasis on neuron-glial interactions in health and oncological disease. Her laboratory studies how neuronal activity regulates healthy glial precursor cell proliferation, new oligodendrocyte generation, and adaptive myelination; this plasticity of myelin contributes to healthy cognitive function, while disruption of myelin plasticity contributes to cognitive impairment in disease states like cancer therapy-related cognitive impairment. Her lab discovered that neuronal activity similarly promotes the progression of malignant gliomas, driving glioma growth through both paracrine factors and through electrophysiologically functional neuron-to-glioma synapses. Studying pathogenic interactions between cancer and the nervous system is a major focus of her research program. Dr. Monje has led several of her discoveries from basic molecular discoveries to clinical trials.