Our School

Our Alumni Speaker Series, sponsored by Post University, continued on Friday, March 28 when Holy Cross graduate, Brooke Cyr '19 spoke to students from our science classes. She is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Comparative Biomedical Science at the University of Georgia and applying to veterinary school.

After graduating high school, Brooke made a last-minute decision to attend Sacred Heart University to study Neuroscience. During her last two years of undergraduate studies, she conducted neuroscience research and published her first article on social brain centers in mice. After earning a Bachelor's degree in Neuroscience with a minor in Chemistry, Brooke worked at UCONN John Depsey Hospital in the Neurology Department, where she focused specifically on Multiple Sclerosis (MS) patients and collaborated with an MS doctor on MS research. This opportunity was particularly meaningful to her, as a close family member had been diagnosed with MS when Brooke was just 10 years old, leading to her involvement with the National MS Society.

Brooke has since become a national ambassador for the MS Society. Over the years of working with the organization, she realized that many MS patients were either misdiagnosed or diagnosed late due to a lack of awareness about the disease and its early signs. Through her research at UCONN, she and her team discovered that although MS is typically diagnosed between the ages of 20 and 50, the onset of the disease actually begins at younger ages. This led Brooke and her research team to develop the first educational framework for identifying the early signs of MS, aimed at educating high school students on what to look for. Their goal is to prevent the potentially debilitating symptoms of MS in the future by enabling earlier diagnoses. Brooke believes that diagnosing MS at its early stages will improve the chances of understanding the cause and finding a cure for the disease.

Although Brooke has shifted her focus to veterinary medicine, she continues to collaborate with the MS Society and her research team, traveling across Connecticut to educate students and the general public about the early signs of MS. The educational framework Brooke and her team developed has now been incorporated into the curriculum at UCONN Medical School and Yale School of Nursing.