Siteman Cancer Center Prevention Expert Named Guggenheim Fellow

With the prestigious award, Yin Cao, ScD, MPH, will write a book examining why cancers are increasingly occurring earlier in life — and how this shift can be better understood, communicated and prevented.

Yin Cao, ScD, MPH, has been named a 2026 Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, one of the nation’s most prestigious honors recognizing exceptional scholarship and creativity.

Selected from nearly 5,000 applicants as part of the foundation’s 101st class of fellows, Cao is recognized for her leadership in integrating data science, cancer etiology and population health. She is a molecular epidemiologist and an associate professor of surgery and of medicine in the Public Health Sciences Division at WashU Medicine and a research member of Siteman Cancer Center, based at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and WashU Medicine.

This year’s class of 223 distinguished honorees work across 55 disciplines, each awardee selected based on past career achievements and exceptional promise. Cao is one of only two fellows recognized in data science.

“Our new class of Guggenheim Fellows is representative of the world’s best thinkers, innovators and creators in art, science and scholarship,” said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and president of the Guggenheim Foundation. “As the foundation enters its second century and looks to the future, I feel confident that this new class of 223 individuals will do bold and inspiring work, undaunted by the challenges ahead. We are honored to support their visionary contributions.”  

Cao leads a research program focused on one of the most urgent questions in modern health: why cancers are rising among younger adults. Anchored in a multidimensional lens spanning exposures, tissues, life stages and populations, her group integrates epidemiologic and biological insights, empowered by data science, to uncover life course risk factors that contribute to cancer risk and tumor progression in younger generations

In recent work, Cao has highlighted the need to transform how cancer risk factors are discovered for prevention. In a perspective in Cell, she and colleagues proposed new interdisciplinary frameworks to accelerate the discovery of cancer causes in the era of rising early-onset cancers. These frameworks for integrating population research, mechanistic biology and data science to understand how exposures accumulate over time, interact across biological systems and shape disease risk long before diagnosis.

“I am deeply honored to receive this Guggenheim Fellowship,” Cao said. “It provides the rare space to think more deeply and creatively about what is needed for the community and to tell a bigger, more connected story — one that brings together science, patients and the public. Our goal is not only to understand why cancer is rising, but to change its trajectory, so fewer young people develop cancer and more are diagnosed earlier and live longer, healthier lives. We cannot achieve this alone, and progress will depend on working together across disciplines and communities.”

Building on years of work she has led to uncover the causes of early-onset colorectal cancer and advance earlier diagnosis in younger populations, Cao now leads a $25 million international initiative through Cancer Grand Challenges, a global team science initiative co-founded by Cancer Research UK and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). With support from the Guggenheim Fellowship, her work will bring this urgent scientific question into a broader public conversation — providing clear, evidence-based understanding to patients, families and communities, helping to strengthen public trust and highlighting prevention as an increasingly important priority for younger generations.