Biochemistry graduate awarded Fulbright to Germany

Madison Cocker started her college education at South Dakota State University on a softball scholarship, but a summer research experience at the University of Minnesota led her to transfer to the Twin Cities and prepare for a career as a physician-scientist. Since the fall of 2023 she has been working with Profesor Kathryn Schwertfeger of the Department of Lab Medicine and Pathology on oncogenic signaling pathways in tumor cells, and she spent last summer as an undergraduate fellow at the Vascular Research Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin. In the fall, she will begin a project with Dr. Professor Katja Schenke-Layland at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Tübingen to develop an extracellular matrix scaffold with both Nidogen-1 and Decorin proteins that can act as a carrier material in islet transplantation procedures for patients suffering from Type 1 diabetes. In addition to her studies and research, Madison has worked for the last three years as a nursing assistant at Olmstead Medical Center and has been a project leader with Engineers without Borders on campus. After completing an MD/PhD, she plans to augment her research with service with Doctors without Borders to address global health emergencies and inequities.