Some researchers first find success late in their careers. And then there’s Keven Stonewall.

Now a rising junior majoring in biology, Stonewall made news with research he did while still in high school. A headline in the New York Daily News declared, “Meet the Chicago Teen Who May Cure Colon Cancer.”

Stonewall’s research, which he conducted as an intern at Rush University while he was a senior at the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences, revealed that an experimental colon cancer vaccine effective in younger mice did not work in older mice. Stonewall won numerous awards for his work and was selected as a finalist for the Intel International Science and Engineer Fair in 2013.

Stonewall, the child of two public school teachers, had always loved science, but while in high school, a close friend’s painful experience losing an uncle to colon cancer made Stonewall determined to fight the disease. “It motivated me to say, ‘Enough is enough, I want to step up and do something about it,’” he says.

More recently Stonewall’s interest has moved toward curing cancer in children. He spent his sophomore year as a student researcher in the lab of Christian Capitini, a pediatric oncologist with the UW–Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. There he worked with mice to study the use of natural killer cells to treat neuroblastoma, a cancer frequently seen in children.

“He has a very advanced understanding of immunology and the immune system,” Capitini says of Stonewall. “He understood the concepts of the project from the beginning, so he could get his hands dirty a lot faster than the typical student.”

And this summer he’s interning with AbbVie, a research-based biopharmaceutical company, at its North Chicago headquarters.

Stonewall is in cancer research for the long haul, and he wants to pursue it as a physician. “My goal is to go to medical school, and I am thinking of going into pediatric oncology afterward,” he says.