Trevor Maxwell is a writer, patient advocate, nonprofit founder, and patient-insights consultant who has spent his career telling human stories — and the past eight years living one he never expected.

In March 2018, at age 41, Trevor was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. Since then, he has undergone seven major surgeries, chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and a clinical trial, while navigating the uncertainty, fear, setbacks, and unexpected gifts that come with living for years with advanced cancer.

Cancer changed the direction of his life.

Soon after his diagnosis, Trevor experienced something he later realized was common among men with cancer: isolation. He had people who loved him deeply, but he didn't know how to let them in, and he didn't have other men who understood what he was going through.

Sitting alone in his car in late 2019, he started brainstorming an idea to change that. It became Man Up to Cancer.

What started as an idea has grown into a national nonprofit and a community of patients, survivors, and caregivers built around a simple belief: men are stronger and smarter as a pack than as lone wolves. With the help of many others, Trevor built MUTC from a volunteer startup into a professionally staffed organization, offering peer-to-peer support, retreats, local chapters, educational programs, and partnerships across the cancer world.

Along the way, Trevor wrote Open Heart, Warrior Spirit: A Man's Guide to Living With Cancer, launched and hosts the Man Up to Cancer Podcast, and became a national speaker and patient advocate. He has shared the patient perspective with researchers, clinicians, cancer organizations, and life sciences companies around the country.

But in many ways, this work brought Trevor back to where he started.

Long before cancer, he was a journalist. Trevor spent about 15 years writing for newspapers, including six years as a staff writer at the Portland Press Herald, covering courts, breaking news, and the lives of ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances. He later moved into communications and public relations, running his own consulting business and helping organizations find their stories and communicate them clearly.

Today, Trevor is bringing those worlds together through Maxwell Patient Insights.

Through MPI, he works with pharmaceutical, biotechnology, diagnostics, and clinical research organizations to bring lived experience closer to the decisions that shape research and patient care. His work includes clinical trial design and participant experience, patient engagement strategy, communications and education, and helping scientific and industry teams understand what their decisions actually feel like on the other side — as a patient and a family.

Trevor believes the patient voice is most valuable before the decisions are made, not after. His work is grounded in his own experience with advanced cancer and clinical research, but also in years spent listening to and learning from thousands of people affected by cancer.

Through all of these chapters, the center of Trevor's life has remained remarkably constant.

He lives in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, with his wife, Sarah, and their Labrador retriever, Grace. Trevor and Sarah are the proud parents of two adult daughters, Sage and Elsie, who have grown up alongside his cancer journey and remain his greatest source of motivation, perspective, and joy.

Trevor doesn't know exactly where the road goes from here. Eight years with stage IV cancer has cured him of believing that any of us really do.

But he knows what he wants to do with the time he has: tell the truth about living with cancer, bring people together, and make the experience better for those who come next.