Another life saved
Last fall, Boston College senior Thomas Gregory sat down to dinner with Randall Ingram, a middle-aged man from Georgia whom he’d just met that day. They talked about the man’s grandchildren and the youth baseball team he coached, and as the conversation progressed, Gregory sometimes forgot what had brought them together in the first place.
“It was awesome just getting to know him and hear his story,” recalled Gregory, a human-centered engineering major. “I don’t think I totally grasped how cool it was that I was meeting someone whose life I had saved.”
A year earlier, Gregory had flown to Florida to donate stem cells that would be used in a life-saving transplant for Ingram, who was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia in 2023. The pair were matched by the Project Life Movement, a nonprofit dedicated to saving the lives of patients suffering from leukemia, lymphoma, and sickle cell disease.
Since 2019, more than 3,200 Boston College students—including Gregory—have signed up to join the Global Stem Cell and Bone Marrow Registry during Project Life’s annual on-campus drives, run in partnership with the Undergraduate Government of Boston College. The registration process is simple: a cheek swab and a signature, all in under 10 minutes. Only about 1 in 1,000 registrants will be called with a potential match, which is why Gregory was surprised to be contacted just a few months after signing up. After further testing, he agreed to go ahead with the donation.
“They made it really easy,” he said of Project Life and its clinical partner, Gift of Life. “They put us up in a hotel on the beach and the procedure was super chill, not painful at all. It was crazy to be sitting there watching movies thinking, ‘this is going to be what cures cancer for someone.’”
“ There’s a long way to go between a match and a transplant. The thing we’ve noticed about BC students is that when they find out they’ve matched, they say yes. ”
Blood cancers affect an estimated 1.7 million Americans, and someone is newly diagnosed every three hours. Stem cell transplants are a highly effective treatment method, but the donor and patient must share specific genetic markers for the cells to be accepted. To expand the donor pool, Project Life hosts more than 60 registration drives on college campuses every year, aided by national ambassador and former NFL star Luke Kuechly ’15. Among them, Boston College stands out, said Executive Director Ann Henegar.
“There’s something different about Boston College,” she said. “The enthusiasm and the support for our events are just exceptional. BC students set the tone for what we wish all multi-day drives were like.”
In the past six years, eight students have answered the call to donate, helping to save the lives of complete strangers. Nationally, around 50 percent of potential donors who are matched with a patient end up following through, said Henegar.
“There’s a long way to go between a match and a transplant,” she said. “The thing we’ve noticed about BC students is that when they find out they’ve matched, they say yes.”
During the fall semester of 2025, Kuechly and Project Life returned to campus for another two-day drive. On a Wednesday night, they held an event in the Heights Room where Kuechly introduced Gregory and Ingram for the first time. The whole thing was “surreal,” said Gregory, who remembers his time in Florida as more like a vacation than a medical procedure.
“Everyone’s like ‘Oh my gosh you’re such a hero,’ but when I describe it to people they’re like, ‘I want to do that,’” said Gregory. “In general, I just want to keep telling people that I did it so that maybe they’ll do it too.”