Cigall discovered the mechanism underlying synovial sarcoma and with Courtney Hodges also showed that mutations in the BAF complex contribute to over 20% of all human malignancy.  She also developed a technique for recruiting the BAF complex to a endogenous gene and measuring the orderly sequence of biochemical events following recruitment.  She joined the faculty at Harvard and recently published the connectivity within the BAF complex and the cryoEM structure of BAF.  She was named Forbes magazine 30 under 30.