CINDY CAMPBELL

Program Director, Children’s Brain Tumor Project
Founder, Ty Louis Campbell (TLC) Foundation and Muddy Puddles Project

Cindy Campbell is the founder of two nonprofit initiatives — the Ty Louis Campbell (TLC) Foundation and the Muddy Puddles Project — both dedicated to supporting childhood cancer research in memory of her son, Ty. Ty was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor at age 2 ½ and passed away just days after his fifth birthday in 2012.

In 2018, Cindy became the Program Director of the Children’s Brain Tumor Project (CBTP) at Weill Cornell Medicine, a research lab focused on improving outcomes for children with brain tumors. This role transformed her life and redirected her focus toward changing the paradigm for children diagnosed with rare and often incurable brain tumors.

Through her work at the CBTP lab, Cindy’s passion for studying pediatric brain tumors at the molecular level led her to connect with the team behind Gift from a Child. In 2020, Cindy was so inspired by families who participated in post-mortem tumor tissue donation that she asked the program’s founders to allow her organization to become a designated Center of Excellence. During this process, she also advocated to share the role of the Tissue Navigator in order to ensure that families considering such a donation can speak to someone who truly understands during their most difficult time.

Through her various nonprofit endeavors, Cindy has directly supported fundraising efforts for dozens of research initiatives, an ongoing fellowship named after Ty, and several international research conferences focused on rare brain tumors in children. The TLC Foundation has hosted more than 22,000 event attendees and attracted over 27,000 followers across social media. Cindy also cultivated a community of support around the Children’s Brain Tumor Project, enabling the lab to nearly triple in size since she joined in 2018.

Cindy has appeared in eight national news segments, including Today, Katie Couric, Sirius Radio Morning Mashup, and Ken Burns’ PBS documentary The Emperor of All Maladies. She also threw out the first pitch at a Yankees game in 2018 as a “Yankees Hope Week” award recipient. Most recently, Cindy was interviewed by Tom Llamas for NBC in 2023, and she presented a TEDx talk in 2022.

Before dedicating her career to helping children with cancer, Cindy was a marketing director at PricewaterhouseCoopers and previously held roles at public relations agencies including Weber Shandwick and Cohn & Wolfe.

Cindy lives in Pawling, NY, with her husband, Lou, and their sons, Gavin (16) and Bodhi (9).