It is with deep sadness that we share the passing of Caley Buxton MS, Class of 2019, on May 31, 2021 from metastatic breast cancer. She earned her B.S. in physics at Colorado State University, and completed a brief tenure at Lockheed Martin as a Mission Analyst, spending her time plotting rocket trajectories and assisting in the creation and building of the Mars Explorer. She left Lockheed Martin to join our program and pursue a more health-centered profession that would directly benefit humanity, explaining “Why should I care about rockets going to other worlds when I can make a difference right here?”
In her graduate career, she studied how x-ray diffraction techniques could differentiate between healthy and cancerous tissue. She hypothesized that a low-dose x-ray pencil beam could accurately and noninvasively characterize tissue. Her work specifically looked at improving the system’s performance by incorporating healthy and cancerous tissue-mimicking materials in phantom experiments. This would allow for better depth resolution of the tissue characterization as well as look at the system’s effectiveness at scanning patients without the need for painful compression. Her personal experience in awaiting a diagnosis after a traumatic biopsy increased her determination to provide a faster and painless cancer-diagnosis method.
She will be missed by all she touched as an unparalleled mind and a generous spirit. Her family requests that donations be made in her memory to any charity that they felt led to.
