Ashley Zachery-Savella

High School Graduation Year: 2012
Year First Awarded the Carson Scholarship, School: 2008, Magothy River Middle School
Sponsored by: Magothy River Middle School Endowment #2

Ashley graduated from University of Maryland, College Park with bachelor’s degrees in neurobiology, physiology and biochemistry. In college, she was involved in the Gemstone Honors College in which she was required to complete a four-year long research project. For her project, she studied Alzheimer’s disease. Throughout high school, she made paper cranes for children with cancer and continued the effort through her co-ed honor fraternity in college. She worked as the clinical research coordinator for the Epilepsy Department at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

Currently, Ashley is a MD-PhD student at the University of Utah. She is doing her Neuroscience PhD in Karen Wilcox’s lab, where she studies mGluR5 expression in astrocytes in epilepsy. She was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease during her second year of medical school, so now she spend her free time advocating for her fellow disabled graduate students through her program’s diversity committee. Ashley is very open about her disability and hopes to educate others about it, given her current career path in medicine and research.