About Me

Profile

About: My name is Corey Timmerman and I'm from Westlake, a small town north of Fort Worth. I moved to Texas when I was in 6th grade from Indiana where I had lived the previous 10 years of my life. I remember absolutely hating it here at first, my main reason was the weather. But now I love Texas, the Longhorns are by far my favorite team and I bleed burnt orange.

I'm currently a Senior majoring in Biology in the College of Natural Sciences. I love doing research, and I've worked in 2 labs since I started college. One is a lab that focuses on fungi that coexist with plants inside their tissue. The other is a lab that studies the tumor suppressor gene called p53 in Drosophila (fruit flies). My post college plans are to attend Medical School here in Texas. I plan on spending a lot of time with Doctors Without Borders working in different parts of the world where people don't have access to basic healthcare.

Along with science, I love the outdoors and staying active. I've been camping over a dozen times and I'm still amazed by the beauty that can be found in nature. I also enjoy painting and drawing, and on a lazy afternoon you may find me studying on the lawn of the Texas State Capitol, my most favorite place in Austin.

Why I Ride

I ride for my grandfather, who passed away from lung cancer 21 years ago. I never got to meet him, he died 2 months before I was born. But from what I hear he sounds really awesome. He ran a ranch out in South Dakota, and fought as a Marine in the Korean War. That's where he started smoking. Back then people didn't know how bad cigarettes where for your health, and the military thought it was a good stress relief to go out and smoke a cigarette. So you were permitted to take breaks if it was to go smoke, but if not then you had to keep working. I can't even imagine how many soldiers came home after surviving the war, when many of their comrades didn't, only to find out years later that they had developed lung cancer. I'm supremely thankful that the harmful effects of smoking have been discovered, and that now lung cancer is on the decline. It just shows the power that people can have when they work together to fight a disease.

I also ride for my dad who is fighting cancer not in himself, but in others. He works as a radiation oncologist at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, and treats people fighting with cancer every day. Radiation therapy is usually the treatment method you turn to when nothing else works, so my dad has treated some very sick people. The good news is that he's been able to cure many of them. So I ride to give him my support, and his patients too, with the hope that one day we will find a cure.