Nick Iwanyshyn/The Globe and Mail
Dressed in pink running gear, complete with pirate hat and plastic sword, Dr. Juliet Daniel, one of McMaster University’s most celebrated research scientists, was a familiar sight at the annual “BRIGHT Run” breast cancer fundraising event in Dundas, Ont. After several weeks of selling countless books of raffle tickets to everyone she knew, Dr. Daniel would personally lead her “Pirates of the CUREabbean” team of young research trainees, dressed in similarly colourful attire, around the 5-kilometre course. She took part in the event every year for the past decade, rain or shine.
“When Juliet asked you to do something, you did it because she was just so determined,” said Nancy McMillan, event chair of BRIGHT Run. “With fundraising, she insisted we had to go higher and she would push, but also be right there beside you to get whatever it was to the finish line,” Ms. McMillan said, noting that Dr. Daniel and her team raised over $125,000 in a decade of doing the BRIGHT Run.
Dr. Daniel died of metastatic breast cancer on April 28 in Dundas. She was 61.
A tenacious researcher, she spent most of her days in her laboratory at McMaster investigating what caused cancers to spread to other parts of the body, focusing mostly on colon and breast tumours. She made her first notable discovery while working at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Tennessee as a postdoctoral fellow in the late 1990s, where she identified a gene that influences how cells grow and interact with each other. She named it Kaiso, an older but largely synonymous word for the Calypso music she listened to during long hours in the laboratory.
Moving to McMaster University in 1999, Dr. Daniel continued researching the Kaiso gene, finding out more about how it influenced cancers to grow and spread to other parts of the body. In 2008, she attended a conference that piqued her interest in a particularly aggressive type of breast cancer called “triple-negative.” This type disproportionately affects young Black and Hispanic women and comes with a lower chance of survival than other types of breast cancer. In a cruel twist of fate, the following year Dr. Daniel herself was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Dr. Daniel is at the centre of this photo, surrounded by members of her team in the BRIGHT Run breast cancer fundraising event.Supplied
These two occurrences were pivotal for how she would approach her work going forward. To this point, Dr. Daniel had been focused on the fundamentals of how Kaiso influenced cells to behave. Her interests expanded and she began to focus on triple-negative breast cancer and health equity issues such as why Black women were less likely to survive breast cancer.
“Triple-negative breast cancer is far more aggressive and spreads very quickly to vital organs, and we don’t currently have a targeted treatment for it. For now, treatment is limited to radiation and chemotherapy, which can be very hard on patients’ bodies and may not fully eradicate the cancerous cells,” Dr. Daniel said in a 2022 profile on her for the Canadian Institutes for Health Research.
Dr. Daniel found that Kaiso was more abundant in cells from women with triple-negative breast cancer and high levels were correlated with a poor chance of survival.
Targeting Kaiso in triple-negative breast cancer cells in the lab reduced their growth and survival, an important discovery in itself. But almost all deaths from breast cancer occur when the cancer cells metastasize, spreading to other organs. Dr. Daniel showed that depleting Kaiso stopped breast cancer cells from spreading in animal models, revealing it to be a promising drug target for new therapies.
Dr. Daniel also became increasingly involved with community organizations including The Olive Branch of Hope, a Toronto-based non-profit providing support to women of African ancestry diagnosed with breast cancer.
“I started the organization after I was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer 27 years ago,” said Leila Springer, the organization’s co-founder and executive director. “I didn’t know where to find any information at all that would help me as a Black woman with breast cancer and I vowed to do something about it. I knew I could not build an organization without adequate information, and I needed to speak to somebody with this knowledge that would also understand our culture. Dr. Daniel became that person,” Ms. Springer said.
Dr. Daniel chaired the Medical and Scientific Committee at The Olive Branch of Hope for several years and was known for her hands-on approach, frequently attending events and meeting other Black women with breast cancer. She built important bridges between Black women undergoing cancer treatment and the scientific community, and actively addressed disparities by talking about the importance of research and clinical trials.
“Dr. Daniel came along and she helped our community to understand: ‘This is what researchers do, how we do it and this is how we use your information.’ She was a go-getter. A champion. The work we started will not stop,” Ms. Springer said.
Dr. Daniel, professor and cancer biologist at McMaster University, at the Hamilton campus in September, 2022.Nick Iwanyshyn/The Globe and Mail
Dr. Daniel was also passionate about mentoring and supporting others, including youth via her position as the founding director of the Canadian Multicultural LEAD Organization for Mentoring and Training. She also co-founded the Canadian Black Scientists Network after years of being the only Black woman working as a professor in McMaster’s Faculty of Science. In a 2022 interview with the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, she recalled attending a Canadian cancer conference in the early 2010s where she was one of only two Black scientists among hundreds in attendance. She described the experience as “shocking,” asking: “How could there have only been two Black cancer researchers in Canada?”
Juliet Michelle Daniel was born Sept. 19, 1964, in Barbados to Lionel Daniel, a furniture maker and June Daniel, a homemaker. She had one brother, Robert Daniel, and attended Queen’s College, then an all-girls school in Saint James, Barbados. She came to Canada in 1983 to begin her undergraduate studies in Life Sciences at Queen’s University, in Kingston, and was originally planning to study medicine afterward.
Following the death of her neighbour in Barbados from breast cancer and her mother’s death from ovarian cancer when Juliet was 21, she pivoted to research and instead obtained a PhD in microbiology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
“I was headed to medical school, but I realized that the physicians were unable to help my mother and my neighbour, not because they weren’t good, but because there were not enough drugs and therapies. … If there’s no one doing research, you are just giving your patients bad news,” Dr. Daniel said at a 2026 event at McMaster University.
Her work eventually earned some of Canada’s highest scientific honours, including fellowship in the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and the Canadian Cancer Society’s Inclusive Excellence Prize.
Dr. Daniel was dedicated to working closely with scientists and government officials in Barbados throughout her time in Canada, including doing research on breast cancer samples and clinical data from the country. Her dedication to her home country earned her an honourary doctorate from the University of the West Indies and she was integral in the establishment of an innovative laboratory in Barbados to support public health and science innovation. Her work was recently acknowledged in a remembrance post by the Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley.
Dr. Daniel with Dr. Shawn Hercules, whom she mentored, at his graduation in 2021.Supplied
To her students, she was a focused and determined mentor. Someone who expected them to be self-motivated and develop leadership and communication skills alongside their scientific work.
“She always saw whatever potential we had and pushed us to achieve that,” said Dr. Shawn Hercules, who completed his PhD in Dr. Daniel’s lab after she recruited him from Barbados during a visit there. “She had a plan in her mind for her trainees and if there was any deviation from that plan, she would check in and ask, ‘How can we get you back on track?’”
As well as staying in touch with trainees who passed through her lab, Dr. Daniel valued her connections with academic colleagues and peers across Canada and would often speak with other scientists about their research, shared values and how to overcome barriers.
“Juliet often spoke about the big challenges facing health research and continued to do so when we spoke in her final months. These included the lack of sustained support for science, persistent inequities that exist at every level of academia and health care, and how slowly discoveries can take to reach people living with cancer,” said Dr. Lisa Porter, a cancer researcher and close friend of Dr. Daniel’s from the University of Windsor.
“But she didn’t just talk about these issues – she acted on them. She advocated fiercely for her students, colleagues and communities, pushed institutions to do better, and was never afraid to speak up when she felt people were not being served or treated equitably,” Dr. Porter said.
Dr. Daniel leaves her brother, Robert Daniel, and his family, and a global community of extended family and friends.
Less than two months before her death, Dr. Daniel sat at a table in a function room overlooking the McMaster University gym as 500 student fundraisers streamed in for the annual university Relay for Life event for the Canadian Cancer Society. Over dinner and decked out in a bright yellow Relay for Life T-shirt, Dr. Daniel talked to cancer survivors, community organizers and students for almost two hours, before giving a brief speech to participants. She talked about her personal experience with breast cancer and her research before finishing with a plea to the next generation:
“I want to encourage you to consider cancer research as a career option, because we need a lot more researchers to help us find the cures that we need to treat cancer, not just in Canada, but globally.”
She then helped lead the first lap of the relay, holding a banner that read: “It takes a society.” She smiled widely while completing that lap, as she did for much of her career, side by side with other cancer survivors, community members, fundraisers and students at the university where she built so much.
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