Macy Vollbrecht has been named a Churchill Scholar by the Winston Churchill Foundation of the United States.
Vollbrecht, a U of M senior majoring in genetics, cell biology and development in the College of Biological Sciences, will spend the 2020-21 academic year at Churchill College of the University of Cambridge. She plans to complete a master’s of philosophy in plant sciences.
Each year, the Churchill Scholarship is awarded to 15 seniors majoring in the sciences, engineering, or mathematics, at colleges and universities across the United States. Macy Vollbrecht is the fifth U of M student in six years to be awarded the Churchill Scholarship.
Growing up in Ames, Iowa, Vollbrecht began pursuing research in genetics at Iowa State University in a National Sciences Foundation program for young scientists and engineers in 2015 before enrolling at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.
As a U of M freshman she began working in Professor Daniel Voytas’s laboratory, which has been developing a way to accelerate gene editing in plants. Vollbrecht designed and carried out experiments there that have been published in Nature Biotechnology.
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