MCW Graduate Student Earns Prestigious Travel Award

Sandra Brown-Ford, a physiology graduate student in the Medical College of Wisconsin’s Biotechnology and Bioengineering Center, is the recipient of a travel award for the 2012 American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) Annual Meeting.

The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology’s MARC (Maximizing Access to Research Careers) program provides the travel awards to promote the entry of underrepresented minority students, postdoctorates and scientists into the mainstream of the basic science community and to encourage the participation of young scientists at the 2012 ASHG Annual Meeting.

Brown-Ford is in her fifth year of graduate work at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW). She earned her bachelor of science degree in chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and completed a master of science in biomolecular chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her mentor is Michael Olivier, Ph.D., professor of physiology and director of the Wisconsin Center for Excellence in Genomics Research.

The travel awards are given to students who are presenting posters or platforms at the ASHG conference, along with faculty mentors. Brown-Ford is looking forward to presenting her poster titled “Differential Protein Expression in Human Induced Pluripotent and Embryonic Stem Cells” at the upcoming November conference.

The MARC program is funded by a grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, National Institutes of Health. A primary goal of the program is to increase the number and competitiveness of underrepresented minorities engaged in biomedical and behavioral research.