At 18, Annika Covington has garnered more research awards than most high school seniors.
Stellar Seniors
The Stellar Senior program is for students who complete the UNMC High School Alliance as juniors but want to further enhance their health science career pathway. Students apply at the end of their junior year and go through an interview process before being selected. This year there were eight students selected for the program.
The recent Louisville (Neb.) High School graduate and UNMC High School Alliance “Stellar Senior” received 10 awards for her project “Dissection-based Investigations of Variations in Major Gross Arterial Supply to the Human Trigeminal Ganglion” across local, state, and national competitions. Her peer-reviewed abstract, which she presented at the Experimental Biology 2021 national conference, will be published later this year in The FASEB (Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology) Journal.
“It’s the most awards I’ve ever seen from one student poster presentation,” said Ethan Snow, PhD, assistant professor in the UNMC Department of Genetics, Cell Biology and Anatomy and anatomy course director for the High School Alliance.
“Collaboration between the High School Alliance and departments like genetics, cell biology and anatomy is key to producing successful research experiences like this, but to achieve such a list of awards also takes a talented and motivated student,” Dr. Snow said.
Dr. Snow mentored Covington on the research project, which focused on blood supply to a major cranial nerve pathway that transmits sensation from the face, in the spring of 2020 and fall of 2021 as part of the UNMC High School Alliance Stellar Senior program.
“Dr. Snow is a great mentor,” Covington said. “He guided the scientific reasoning and thinking behind my project and taught me about scientific writing and understanding how vastly different scientific research is than anything else I’ve experienced.”
The UNMC High School Alliance provided incredible learning opportunities to explore different health professions, as well as biomedical research, but the last year in particular afforded her the opportunity to learn something much deeper, Covington said.
“I’ve met people from so many different backgrounds, ethnicities through my time at UNMC and never really understood the issues of racism and social justice that so many other people face,” she said. “Just being able to learn more about other people, see the world through their eyes and understand how beneficial it is for people to see someone in health care who looks like them that they can relate to, it can make a big difference in overall health outcomes.”
Covington said her instructors discussed health disparities alongside the rest of the curriculum and it gave her a sense of the compassion and empathy those health professionals bring to their career.
“It makes me proud,” she said. “They weren’t just teaching us the textbook side of health care but giving us the understanding and tools that we could one day use to treat folks of different religious, cultural or ethnic backgrounds that is so important in providing equitable care.”
Covington plans to attend George Washington University in Washington, DC, and major in political science with a minor in mandarin Chinese; she also is on the pre-med track and hopes to one day apply to medical school at UNMC.
Congratulations to Annika & all of the stellar seniors!
Awesome work, Annika. The UNMC High School Alliance is an amazing program. Kudos to all involved in the alliance.
Outstanding! Congratulations to Annika and all others!
Congratulations to Annika, to all of our Stellar Seniors, and to all of our other students. It has been a year unlike any other. Thank you for going on the journey with us that we call the UNMC High School Alliance.