NEWLY MINTED MSU ALUM TAPPED BY NIH

Craig Pearson, Michigan State University’s 16th Marshall Scholar, has been admitted into the National Institutes of Health Oxford-Cambridge Scholars program.

In the fall, Pearson will begin his doctorate in clinical neurosciences at the University of Cambridge funded by the Marshall Scholarship. His final two years will be spent working with a co-mentor at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

“It’s a fantastic opportunity to build new relationships between laboratories in the U.S. and the U.K., and I’m thrilled to have the chance to work with two mentors and in two labs, while maintaining a cohesive focus on a single Ph.D. project,” said Pearson, who belonged to the Honors College and earned three bachelor's degrees, one each in biochemistry and molecular biology, neuroscience and English.

Launched in 2001, over 150 of the United States’ most promising biomedical Ph.D. students have been admitted to this unique program, which offers access to the insights and resources of multiple mentors at the three collaborating institutions. The requirement to integrate different mentor input stimulates student self-reliance and creativity. This access to senior faculty advising and a large, diverse graduate student population helps the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars build intellectual and personal skills, perspectives, and peer networks.

Pearson wants to develop treatments for blindness and other visual impairments.

“Over 285 million people worldwide are visually impaired, and 39 million are blind,” Pearson said. “Finding ways to treat conditions causing blindness and visual dysfunction will drastically improve the quality of life for individuals affected by these conditions.”

Pearson entered MSU as an Alumni Distinguished Scholarship recipient and served as an undergraduate research assistant in the MSU Department of Small Animal Clinical Sciences and an undergraduate lab manager and lead undergraduate researcher for the MSU Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab. He has served as a clinical volunteer at the MSU Department of Neurology and Ophthalmology, was the student managing editor for ReCUR, the Red Cedar Undergraduate Research Journal, and was founding managing editor of Exceptions: The Art and Literary Journal for Students with Visual Disabilities.

Pearson is from Bloomfield Hills and graduated from University of Detroit Jesuit High School.