2010 proved to be another eventful and exciting year for the Amgen Scholars Program. Last year, the Amgen Foundation demonstrated its ongoing commitment to the Amgen Scholars Program by announcing four years of additional funding.
In 2010, the Program also selected Washington University in St. Louis as a new host institution, and the University welcomes its first group of Scholars this summer.
The Amgen Scholars alumni network has grown considerably since the Program's first group completed their summer research projects in 2007. As of fall 2010, 279 former Scholars are pursuing graduate degrees in science and medicine at more than 75 universities. More details are available in the 2010 annual report.
The 2010 report also highlights the work of last year's scholars, including:
- James Clements, a mechanical engineering student at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, who picked up his first pipette while in Dr. Paul Yager's group at the University of Washington in Seattle
- Karla Ramos, a Scholar majoring in chemistry who spent the summer at the University of California, Berkeley. See more of Karla's story in this video.
- Burak Tepe, who studied the visual system of fruit flies in Dr. Hiromu Tanimoto's Behavioral Genetics Lab at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
In addition, the report features 2009 Scholar Ana Tufegdžic Vidakovic, who is pursuing a doctoral degree in oncology at the University of Cambridge, and Amgen Scholar faculty adviser Dr. Elizabeth H. Blackburn, a molecular biologist and faculty mentor in the Amgen Scholars Program who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine for her co-discovery of telomerase and tireless study of telomeres.
Looking forward, the program has extended its support to alumni through its new [travel awards](link to travel award feature), which provide funding for alumni to attend national and international conferences, share their research and network with top scientists in their fields.
As you'll see in the report, there is a lot to be proud of and even more to look forward to. Check it out.
