Born and raised in New York City, Caroline Elizabeth Haoud attended Bard High School Early College II and graduated with her high school diploma and an Associates of Arts degree conferred by Bard College. Caroline is currently studying biochemistry as a Quest scholar and Gates Millennium scholar at Columbia University with plans to train as a physician-scientist in the near future.
After her first year, she participated in the Gateways to the Laboratory program and studied Alzheimer’s disease in Dr. Makoto Ishii’s lab at Weill Cornell Medical College. Caroline later returned to the Gateways to the Laboratory Program and earned the Director’s Award for her work in Dr. Jessica Tyler’s lab where she studied the DNA repair response within the context of double stranded breaks. At Columbia, she spent a year in Dr. Stavros Lomvardas’ lab studying Alzheimer’s disease within the context of olfaction. Currently, she studies decision-making in Drosophila melanogaster in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate Dr. Richard Axel at the Mortimer Zuckerman Institute at Columbia University. She has presented her research at the Leadership Alliance National Symposium in Connecticut, Columbia University Undergraduate Research Symposium and Harvard University’s National Collegiate Research Conference.
She is a teaching assistant under Dr. Claire Hazen for Contemporary Biology Lab and was a teaching assistant for the Science Honors Program which hosts high school students throughout the tri-state area to learn molecular biology theory and conduct experiments. She served on the research committee of the American Physician-Scientist Association chapter at Columbia and was an office intern for Soaringwords, a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to bring positive psychology tools to hospitalized children and their families. Caroline is passionate about access to science, teaching and service, particularly in underserved communities and has volunteered with Heart2Heart (H2H), an organization that offers free health screenings for high cholesterol, diabetes and hypertension in marginalized communities, the World Science Festival and BioBus at Columbia. Caroline has stayed involved with the Ron Brown Scholar Program and has served on the planning committee for the 2018 GPS College Access and Equity Conference in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania.
At Columbia, she spends her free time exploring open spaces with the hiking club, connecting with sisters in alpha omicron pi, reading biographies and novels and learning finance principles through TAMID. Caroline earned her black belt in Tae Kwon Do and now dedicates herself to the discipline of Muay Thai. Currently, she is training for the TCS 2020 marathon and enjoys the practice of meditation.
