- Burnett School College of Medicine Students
Three undergraduates in the Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences and a fourth-year M.D. student were recently inducted into UCF’s Order of Pegasus, the university’s highest student honor.
Nineteen students were selected as the 2015 class of honorees. College of Medicine inductees are Amy Iarrobino, an honors Class of 2015 student in the M.D. program, who was one of four graduate student winners, and Jorge “Andres” Hernandez, Gerald Richardson and Jeremy Tran, all majors in the Burnett School who were among 15 undergraduate honorees.
In announcing the honorees, UCF President John C. Hitt said the students “have demonstrated exemplary university and community involvement, leadership, academic achievement, and service.”
Hernandez is a senior majoring in biomedical sciences at the Burnett School. Not only has he worked to get into medical school next fall, but he was also named as a second-team All-American pitcher of the UCF Club Baseball Team in 2014. And when he wasn’t studying or playing sports, he was volunteering as mentor, medical translator, teacher and caregiver for a variety of organizations that support underprivileged and underserved communities in Orlando, Tampa and Miami, including Shepherd’s Hope, BASE Camp, Clean the World, San Jose Mission Clinic and others.
Iarrobino received her B.A. in biology from Rollins College and competed as a professional figure skater before entering medical school. As an M.D. student, she has excelled academically, earning several scholarships and the College of Medicine’s Academic Excellence Award. She served as co-president of the Alpha Omega Alpha national medical honor society and has published four peer-reviewed manuscripts on basal cell carcinoma and melanoma. She has been an active volunteer in the areas of literacy and healthy children. She will begin her internal medicine residency at University of Pennsylvania this summer.
Richardson’s dream is to become a physician and researcher. He has engaged in research focused on a chemical approach to solar energy, which earned him a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship. Richardson has been active in the President’s Leadership Council, Student Undergraduate Research Council and has served as a Supplemental Instruction leader for chemistry and biology courses. With the help of the Burnett Honors College and a colleague, he co-founded a club that helps children develop leadership and teamwork skills at a local elementary school.
Tran also plans to enter medical school in the fall. He has conducted research on exploring new drugs to revise the silencing of genes caused by cancer. He has presented his research on multiple occasions and won first place in the Life Sciences Category at the Showcase of Undergraduate Research Excellence. A leader in the Pre-Med American Medical Student Association, he is passionate about teaching others. He has served as a peer tutor for the PRIME STEM Project and the Burnett School and as a lab teaching assistant through the PILOT program. He is an alumnus of the LEAD Scholars Academy.