Hillyer Lab News
Hillyer Lab News
Undergraduate Student Sarah Coggins Graduates With Highest Honors, Receives the Prestigious Founder’s Medal
Friday, May 13, 2011
Today, Sarah Coggins earned her B.A degrees in Cellular & Molecular Biology and Spanish. In completing these degrees, she earned “Highest Honors in Molecular and Cellular Biology” and was conferred by the College of Arts and Science the Founder’s Medal. This prestigious award represents first honors, and is presented to the top student of a year’s class. It is the highest award that can be bestowed on a Vanderbilt student. A truly remarkable achievement.
At the same time, this also concludes Sarah’s tenure in the Hillyer Lab. She accomplished a lot during her three years in the Hillyer Lab, and will definitely be missed. We wish her the best in her future endeavors.
Sarah Coggins receives her degrees from Dean Carolyn Dever
Sarah Coggins and Julian Hillyer
• From the “Vanderbilt News” website (LINK):
Sarah Coggins, Cabot, Ark., Founder’s Medalist for the College of Arts and Science, is graduating summa cum laude with a bachelor of arts and a double major in biological sciences and Spanish. She has been involved in research for the past six semesters as an undergraduate member of the Hillyer lab studying the immune responses of two mosquito species. Understanding mosquito immune processes could aid in combating the spread of mosquito-borne diseases.
She was awarded a fellowship from the Vanderbilt Undergraduate Summer Research Program and has presented at the annual conference of the American Society of Parasitologists. She was the four-year recipient of the Robert Harvey Honor Scholarship, a full-tuition merit scholarship. She is in the honors program for Molecular and Cellular Biology and she will turn her findings from the past three years into a senior thesis. She plans to publish her research and is writing a manuscript on which she is the first author. Outside the lab, she participated in the Vanderbilt-in-Spain program in Madrid and has used her language skills to chat with Spanish-speaking patients while volunteering in Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s emergency department, and as a student medical interpreter at the Matthew Walker Comprehensive Health Center in Nashville.
For more information on the Founder’s Medal, click HERE.
Founder’s Medal:
Cornelius Vanderbilt’s gifts to the university included endowment of this award, given since 1877 for first honors in each graduating class. The medal is gold.
Obverse. The profile of Cornelius Vanderbilt is a replica of the one by sculptor Salathiel Ellis on the gold medal that was presented to the Commodore by action of Congress in 1864 to express the nation’s gratitude for his gift of his new steamship, Vanderbilt, to the government during the Civil War.
Reverse. The words “Founder’s Medal for First Honors” appear on the reverse of the medal with space below for the recipient’s name, date and the school or college to be engraved.