JTC 25: Committed to Her Cause

While caring for patients during the COVID-19 pandemic, Lindsay Ashton found her passion. And that's before she graduated from high school.

The pandemic began during her senior year of high school and instead of remaining at home, the Nashville, Tennessee, native started working at an urgent care clinic. There, she saw up to 90 patients a day, often administering tests and taking information to help an already flooded health care system.

“I just ended up falling in love with it there,” Ashton said. “After my freshman year at Ole Miss, I came back and they trained me as a medical assistant, so I’ve been working there all of college.

“That experience is what really pushed me to choose going to medical school.”

A graduating senior, Ashton has spent four years committed to her goal of becoming a doctor. The biologymajor spent her college years shadowing doctors, working in clinics and volunteering her time at hospice centers.

Along the way, she’s become a passionate and diligent researcher, said Yongjian Qiu, assistant professor of integrative plant biology. Ashton has been an undergraduate research assistant in Qiu’s lab for the past three years.

“In my lab, we have had several incredible students, but Lindsay is one of the best,” he said. “She’s dedicated to the research. If she’s not in class or in her extracurricular activities, she’s in the lab doing work.”

Ashton was also among the inaugural winners of the Stamps Impact Prize, which funded her research into negative gravitropism in plants — the ability for plants to grow against gravity.

“This has so many implications, one of them being food insecurity,” she said. “With climate change going on, a lot of these plants are falling over, and it makes the crop yields pretty much inaccessible and unusable.

“If you can fix this problem, in the long term you could work to solve food insecurity.”

Ashton’s work in Qiu’s lab has been so exemplary that he said he wants to list her as a co-author on their upcoming research publication, which is rare for an undergraduate student.

“She contributed a lot to this project,” he said. “I want to include her not just because of her hardworking attitude, but her dedication to the science.”

Ashton was recently accepted to Case Western Reserve University’s master’s program in medical physiology and hopes to one day become an oncologist.

“This past summer, I worked at Tennessee Oncology as a medical assistant,” she said. “That was really special to me because my grandmother was actually treated for cancer there during my junior year.

“Seeing the impact that those people had on her really inspired me. It made me want to be an advocate for people like my grandmother, too.”

Ole Miss has been a crucial step on her journey to achieving that dream, she said.

“I don’t think I ever would have been involved in research without Dr. Qiu and that support system from his lab,” she said. “I’ve met people here I truly don’t think I ever would have been able to meet if I hadn’t been here.

“Every year, I pushed myself a little bit more, and I think I’ve been pushed out of my comfort zone, but in the best way.”

Top: Lindsay Ashton, a biology major from Nashville, discovered her calling in medicine while working through the COVID-19 pandemic and went on to excel in research at the University of Mississippi, paving the way for a future in oncology and patient advocacy. Photo by Srijita Chattopadhyay/Ole Miss Digital Imaging Services

See more photos from Lindsay Ashton's Journey to Commencement