MSUM students win Mayo Clinic IMPACT competition
A team of four MSUM undergraduates (Bioscience majors Trysten Jensen and Whitney Shegrud and BCBT majors Kervens Accilien and Nik Newville) was awarded first place in the Mayo Clinic’s annual IMPACT competition. The team submitted a proposal earlier this semester detailing their hypothesis explaining what may be the underlying cause of hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS). Their proposal was selected as one of ten finalists from the hundreds of proposals submitted by teams at Universities across Minnesota and Wisconsin. At the start of the month they gave an oral presentation of their proposal at the IMPACT symposium in Eau Claire, WI. Their first place award was based on their written proposal and oral presentation. They have each been awarded a $1,000 prize, and all four students have been offered a paid research internship opportunity at the Mayo Clinic this summer.
In addition to the success of their written and oral proposal presentations, this group was awarded an honorable mention at the poster presentation portion of the IMPACT symposium. It should be noted that their poster was the only one of the ten finalists to also be recognized in that format.
The IMPACT program (Innovative Minds Partnering to Advance Curative Therapies) is an undergraduate program sponsored by Regenerative Medicine Minnesota and the Mayo Clinic Office of Applied Scholarship and Education Science. Biosciences professor Adam Stocker is the group’s faculty sponsor.
