In the early 1970s Connie was recruited by Lloyd Skarsgard as one of the first scientists at the British Columbia Cancer Research Centre. Together with her husband, Allen Eaves, she founded the Terry Fox Laboratory (TFL) within the BC Cancer Research Centre in 1981 and the rest, as they say, is history. Connie remained at the TFL until her untimely death on 7 March 2024 at the age of 79. As generations of PhD students and postdoctoral fellows joined her lab, Connie proved to be a wonderful mentor, incredible scientist and kind person. She instilled in us the importance of using the right controls and being consistently rigorous in every experiment, training that we benefited from throughout our careers. We witnessed her tireless and passionate contributions to science, devotion to nurturing future generations of scientists, and advocacy for early-career female scientists from the start of her career until its very end.
Connie was a loving mother of 4 and grandmother of 11, and was naturally always running from one commitment to another. When Connie and Allen started the TFL in 1981, they had a vision of creating a community that worked together. This distinguished the TFL from other departments we had worked in previously, where competition, rather than cooperation, was the norm. Our little group of principal investigators collaborated extensively, helped each other with research grants and became lifelong friends. We believe that it is because of this community Connie and Allen built that the TFL became the longest continuously funded National Cancer Institute of Canada group in Canada. Our dearest hope is that we can continue Connie’s legacy by growing this spirit of camaraderie in her memory.
