May 29, 2012 College News - Jeremy Allred, a third-year medical student at the Medical College, has been selected for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Fellows Program, a one-year research enrichment program that increases the training of physician-scientists.
Allred is one of 70 students nationwide to be selected from a pool of hundreds of applicants. Fellows in the program take a year off of medical school to pursue biomedical research at a laboratory anywhere in the country except at the National Institutes of Health. Students must identify a research plan and a mentor when applying.
Allred will spend the next year at Harvard Medical School, studying stem cells and hematopoiesis (the formation and development of blood cells in the bone marrow). This project will build on Allred’s research at the Medical College, where he has been working with his mentor, Dr. Sridhar Rao, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics (Hematology/ Oncology). Allred’s participation in the Medical College’s summer research program culminated in a poster presentation explaining the role of a transcription factor in AML, a type of leukemia.
Allred grew up in Madison, Wis., and earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Minnesota. He spent three years doing research at the University of Minnesota before starting medical school.
Allred plans to pursue a career in academic medicine, combining patient care with research, and is particularly interested in hematology, oncology and cardiology.