Class of 2010

Graduating student Alex Legge is returning to Dal in September as a med student. (Nick Pearce Photo)

Talk about dedication. Even while she was on the mend from surgery to her knee, varsity women’s basketball player Alex Legge never missed a practice, never missed a game.

For the first half of the season, she couldn’t play, but she’d put on her Tigers jersey anyway and offer what help she could from the bench.

“It was definitely tough to sit on the sidelines, especially when I could tell my team needed me,” says Ms. Legge, 21, three-time Academic All-Canadian from Mahone Bay, N.S. She was recently honored with the 2010 James Bayer Memorial Scholarship Award, presented annually to an outstanding student athlete for excellence in academics, athletics, leadership, sportsmanship and citizenship.

Wearing a brace on her right knee, she was back on the court again in January and immediately made a difference to her team. (The Tigers had one win and six losses in the first half of the season, and eight wins and two losses in the second half.)

Coach Anna Stammberger says her Ms. Legge brings intensity and intelligence to the court, not surprising given the focus of her studies at Dalhousie: neuroscience. It’s the study of the nervous system—including the brain, the spinal cord, and networks of sensory nerve cells, or neurons, throughout the body.

The demanding, four-year program also gives students a foundation in mathematics, biology, chemistry and physics.

“That’s one of the things I like about it,” explains Ms. Legge, who has been accepted into Dalhousie Medical School for the fall. “I was able to get that broader science background, which is good preparation for medical school, and take my neuroscience classes, which are more human-based than some of the other science disciplines.”

But even with everything she crammed into her brain over four years, she says she’s staggered by how much more there is to discover. What is the mind? Why do people feel emotions? What are the underlying causes of neurological and psychiatric disorders? “Really, that’s one of the major things I’ve taken away—just how much there is for us to understand about the brain. It’s really a mystery still being unraveled.”