Dr. Nancy Davidson is the senior vice president and director of the Clinical Research Division at Fred Hutch. She serves as a bridge builder across the cancer treatment and research programs of the Fred Hutch/University of Washington Cancer Consortium. Dr. Davidson, a breast cancer oncologist, has built a worldwide reputation for her expertise and leadership in this field, for her research teasing out the role of hormones in breast cancer growth, and for her impact on the development of new standards of care. Her team was the first to describe how the activity of one of the estrogen receptor genes is regulated by epigenetic factors, which affect how the DNA code is read and translated into proteins. She has also made foundational contributions to our understanding of how estrogen deprivation and other therapies trigger breast cancer cells to kill themselves through apoptosis, or programmed cell death. Her lab studies paved the way for new clinical trials of drugs that exploit hormonal pathways to kill breast cancer. She has also led several critical trials that have established new therapeutic regimens for patients with the disease.