UIC Graduate Student Wins Doolen Scholarship
Jessica Wilson, a University of Illinois at Chicago graduate student, has been named a Paul D. Doolen Graduate Scholar for the Study of Aging for 2013-2014.
She will receive $3,500 to continue her studies in the field of gerontology.
Wilson, who won the award in the biological-biomedical sciences category, is in the UIC College of Medicine pursuing an M.D./Ph.D. in pharmacology.
Wilson’s neuroscience research focuses on the relationship between aging, neurodegenerative disease, and the neuronal plasticity that buffers these processes. Currently, she is investigating the effect of the scaffold protein Intersectin1 on the development of Alzheimer’s disease.
She received her bachelor’s degree in psychology from Arizona State University and lives in Chicago.
The Doolen Scholarship is awarded annually to graduate students in their second year of study or beyond, whose principal scholarly interest is in the field of aging.
The scholarship was established in 1986 by an endowment from the Retirement Research Foundation to honor the late Paul D. Doolen, a long-time member of the University of Illinois Foundation’s board of directors and a 1927 graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
UIC ranks among the nation’s leading research universities and is Chicago’s largest university with 27,500 students, 12,000 faculty and staff, 15 colleges and the state’s major public medical center. A hallmark of the campus is the Great Cities Commitment, through which UIC faculty, students and staff engage with community, corporate, foundation and government partners to improve the quality of life in metropolitan areas around the world.
