Apr. 23, 2025 ̶ ̶ At age 20, University of Memphis sophomore Blake Robinson has a busier schedule than most college students his age. When he’s not maintaining a 4.0 GPA in the classroom, he’s splitting time between two different science labs in Memphis, one on UofM’s campus with Biomedical Engineering Professor Dr. Joel Bumgardner and the other at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. So, what’s fueling this drive?
“Short answer may be neuroticism,” Robinson joked. “It kind of goes back to my childhood. My father wasn’t in my life all that much in the beginning. And so, it was just me and my mom, and I saw how hard she would work.”
Robinson, a Bartlett native, grew up in a healthcare household. His mom and stepdad work for Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital, and his biological father was an EMT. But it was an unfortunate diagnosis that truly sparked his interest in medicine.
“My mother was diagnosed with two brain aneurysms,” said Robinson. “It’s a scary situation. She was enrolled in a clinical trial at NYU, and that kind of showed me the power of medicine at a young age.”
After graduating from Bartlett High School, Robinson enrolled at UofM in the fall of 2023, declaring a major in Chemistry with a Biochemistry concentration. He dove headfirst into his academic journey, landing a spot in Bumgardner’s lab as a freshman. Robinson, who didn’t grow up with a lot of mentors, wanted to be in the company of people who could push and guide him.
“I was doubly impressed that he was already looking into research opportunities and that he was looking beyond his immediate department for opportunities given most freshman students are busy meeting new peers, managing courses, enjoying new freedoms and adjusting to college life in general,” said Bumgardner.
“I identified some pretty successful pre-med students here that were senior to me.” Robinson said. “And so, I got an early insight into what it took to be successful through the pre-med path, and that played a tremendous role in how I went about opportunities and followed my passions.”
Those passions are taking Robinson across the country. Last summer, he completed a summer research program at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, Washington, where he worked with the neurosurgery department to develop pharmaceuticals aimed at treating high-grade meningiomas for tumor recurrence. This summer, he’ll be off to Cambridge, Mass. for the Biomedical Summer Research Program at Harvard.
At St. Jude, Robinson is currently on a team working to develop treatments for epilepsy. His research at UofM, meanwhile, focuses on wound treatment. Taking what is called chitosan, a biomaterial derived from the exoskeleton of shrimp that has anti-inflammatory, biodegradable and anti-bacterial properties, Robinson is using his findings for bone regeneration, wound healing and tissue engineering. His work was accepted for oral presentation at the most recent World Biomaterials Congress in Daegu, South Korea.
“This project was initially stalled since prior senior level undergraduate students quickly became discouraged due to many failures,” Bumgardner said. “However, with the methodical and persistent efforts by Blake – he had volunteered over 300 hours to this effort – we have been able to narrow down promising green solvent solution composition for use in our electrospinning process.
“This could be used for surgical wound treatment or in the battlefield for soldiers, so there’s an extreme variety of uses that it can be used for,” Robinson said.
To top it all off, Robinson was recently notified that he was selected as a Goldwater Scholar and recipient of a Goldwater Scholarship, provided by the Barry Goldwater Scholarship & Excellence in Education Foundation, considered to be one of the most prestigious undergraduate scholarships in the STEM field. Robinson is one of 425 scholars, selected from a pool of thousands from across the country, and the first scholar from UofM since Melanie Sparks in 2012.
As a piece of advice to incoming pre-med students, Robinson says you should surround yourself with good mentors and to take the small wins day by day.
“I mean, this journey I’m on started off with me just shadowing doctors right out of high school and doing a little bit of volunteering at Methodist,” Robinson said. “Now it’s just compounded into something so unimaginable.”
Bumgardner predicted, “Blake Robinson’s innate curiosity, meticulous approach and tenacious spirit coupled with his high intellect, mark him as someone well on their way to becoming a creative, insightful and impactful biomedical researcher.”
It comes as no surprise that Robinson hopes to graduate from the UofM a year early and walk the stage in May of 2026. With med school on the brain, Robinson says his top-four medical schools are UT Health Science Center, Vanderbilt, Harvard and NYU, due to his connection with his mother’s clinical trial. He has literally years to figure out the field he’d like to practice in, but Robinson said he currently feels drawn to neurology. With a track record like his already, it’s safe to assume that whatever his decision is, he’ll excel in it.
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