The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) honored a number of cancer researchers and physician-scientists for their achievements during the AACR Annual Meeting 2022, held April 8-13 in New Orleans. The 2022 AACR Award for Outstanding Achievement in Basic Cancer Research was presented to Christina Curtis, PhD. This award recognizes an early-career investigator for meritorious achievements in basic cancer research. Dr.Curtis, is Associate Professor of Medicine and Genetics and an Endowed Scholar at Stanford University School of Medicine. She is also the Director of Breast Cancer Translational Research and Co-Director of the Molecular Tumor Board at the Stanford Cancer Institute, and a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator at Stanford. Dr. Curtis is being honored for her paradigm-shifting research on tumor evolution, including the Big Bang model which explains how treatment-naïve cancers grow in the absence of therapeutic influence. She further developed this fundamental milestone in cancer research to explain the tendency that some cancers have to disseminate and metastasize, with implications for improved patient stratification and emergent diagnostic approaches for early cancer and pre-cancer detection.