About

Sarah Sherman points to her co-op at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2015 as a seminal moment in her Northeastern experience. Not only did she receive her first hands-on experience in cancer research—which has become her passion—but she also learned of the hospital’s work to enhance cancer care in Botswana, where she says poor access to pathology has hindered timely diagnoses.

Sherman, S’17, earned a Fulbright Scholarship to travel to Botswana to conduct an eight-month research project focused on evaluating whether recent improvements to the country’s pathology labs have affected the processing time for samples to generate timely cancer diagnoses.

Sherman’s research and global experiences at Northeastern have collectively fueled her passion for global public health. On co-op at Massachusetts General Hospital, her work included planning and coordinating experiments to test novel chemotherapeutics as part of preclinical breast cancer research. She secured that co-op through Northeastern’s CanCURE program, which provides undergraduates experiential learning opportunities in cancer nanomedicine research.

In summer 2016, Sherman interned at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, where she trained in the Pediatric Oncology Education program. Later that year, she completed a co-op at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where she gained more hands-on experience as an undergraduate research assistant.