International Falls resident Julia Rinn was one of five students from the University of Minnesota Crookston to take part in the third annual competition March 5 in the Innovative Minds Partnering to Advance Curative Therapies Program at Mayo Clinic in Rochester.
The IMPACT program challenges undergraduate students to form interdisciplinary teams and propose innovative hypotheses to unanswered clinical questions. They chose from three research questions that address the causes of hypoplastic left heart syndrome, bipolar disorder, and ovarian cancer.
Rinn is a senior at the U of M Crookston.
The five health science/pre-med majors focused their research submission on the question of the underlying cause of hypoplastic left heart syndrome.
All of the undergraduate students who participated in the IMPACT program looked into new developments in regenerative medicine and applied their new awareness to the real life context of solving critical clinical questions.
This year’s IMPACT program reached out to the 65 colleges and universities across Minnesota that have biology faculty members. Each IMPACT team was invited to submit a poster for presentation at the IMPACT Symposium at Mayo Clinic.
The undergraduate program is sponsored by Regenerative Medicine Minnesota and the Mayo Clinic Office for Applied Scholarship and Education Science. The mission of the IMPACT program is to encourage creative solutions to critical health questions through collaboration between undergraduate students and Mayo Clinic.
