Twenty-five students from eight different undergraduate and community college programs have joined the Institutional Development Award Program (IDeA) Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE)/ Biomedical Research Infrastructure Network (BRIN) program.
Established in 2001, the BRIN program was created to expose students to serious biomedical research, build a statewide biomedical research infrastructure between undergraduate and graduate institutions and to strengthen undergraduate institution’s infrastructure and increase its capacity to conduct cutting-edge biomedical and behavioral research.
Today, we meet Ladessa Heimbouch, one of the new BRIN scholars on campus.
What is the name of your hometown?
Scottsbluff
What are you majoring in and where do you go to school?
I major in biology at UNL.
Tell me about yourself. Who your heroes are?
My hero was my dad. He was dealt a bad hand in life having to deal with diabetes and everything that comes with that disease. No matter how hard it was for him to get up in the morning, he worked and even tried to go back to school to get an education until he couldn’t anymore. He died in August. Everything I do is for him.
What are your career goals?
To get my Ph.D. in medical research and study genetic diseases like diabetes to hopefully find a cure for one of them.
How did you become interested in science?
I always thought it was the most interesting of all the subjects in school. It’s fun and I was good at it.
What do you hope the BRIN program will do for you?
I hope that it will give me experience and advantages in the field of medical research and to make me a better researcher than I could ever imagine.
How do you see science evolving over the next 20 years?
I think the advances in science will be huge. I don’t necessarily think we’ll find a lot of cures, but much better ways to manage infectious and genetic diseases so that people with these diseases will have a much better quality of life.