
A full-time undergraduate researcher at the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ); a volunteer at Mercer County Correctional Center; a health clinic volunteer in Peru—these may sound like the accomplishments of three different people, but one ambitious student, Michelle Cornacchia ’09, achieved them all in one summer.

“What really excited me as a child was the idea that my suburban New Jersey backyard didn’t always look the way it looked,” he recalled. “As long as I can remember, I understood the earth was very, very old. The plants and animals on this planet changed and at one time there were dinosaurs walking through my backyard. I used to look out my bedroom window and imagine what it looked like in the past.” Being an evolutionary biologist, Dr. Wund says, is like never quite growing out of your childhood dinosaur phase.

As part of her MD/PhD coursework at Yale University, Katherine Uyhazi ’05 is doing research work at the Yale Stem Cell Center under the direction of Dr. Haifan Lin. In February, Uyhazi returned to TCNJ to give a talk, “MDs, PhDs, and Stem Cells: Everything You Wanted to Know but were Afraid to Ask,” as part of the Young Alumni Lecture Series.

Among the famous House-isms, as the pearls of cynical wisdom from the mouth of Dr. Gregory House, M.D., have come to be known, is the reoccurring assertion that, everybody lies.” Here at TCNJ, it is no lie though that first-year students have the opportunity to watch the popular television drama and learn about the science and medicine depicted in the series but also to engage discussion on its broader sociological themes.
