Decades of research have demonstrated that a balanced diet is elemental for human health. Malnutrition affects all socioeconomic levels and cultures, with particular impact on individuals in low resource settings. However, our understanding of how individual nutrients effect the cellular changes associated with aberrant states is at its infancy. The underlying hypothesis for our work is that each component of a balanced diet influences signal transduction pathways in target cells, resulting in a collective developmental response within tissues. Our goal is to map the signal transduction pathways targeted by individual nutrients in vivo, in order to build a comprehensive mechanistic understanding of how dietary imbalance affects normal development and identify inexpensive, widely accessible interventions to reduce and treat cancer and other diseases.  To do this, we pair a professional laboratory with a large scale citizen science effort.  The main lab investigates nutrient impacts on stem cell lifespan and function, utilizing nutrients and signaling pathways identified by thousands of students contributing data through our citizen science efforts. This approach is promoting research as a career among students throughout the Philadelphia region, while driving our understanding of stem cell regulation and dietary intervention for improvement of cancer prevention and treatment.