STEM CELL STAR:

In 1992, a car crash left 14-year-old Miami Beach native Sabrina Cohen a quadriplegic. She underwent rigorous years of therapy, but her head hung low. “I didn’t want to be known as the girl in the wheelchair,” she recalls. High school graduation made her realize life would go on, with her or without her, so she went to college, graduated, and opened her own ad agency. But in 2004, after hearing a presentation on stem cell research, Cohen changed course. “That talk ignited in me a hope that had long since simmered down,” she says, “that someday I would walk again.” Shuttering the agency, she worked for the Genetics Policy Institute, then launched her own foundation to help people donate funds for stem cell research in the United States. With a volunteer base of friends, relatives and even the firefighters who helped rescue her, she organized fundraising events and this year reached a milestone. The Sabrina Cohen Foundation for Stem Cell Research bestowed its first grant: a $25,000 check to University of California-Irvine researcher Hans Keirstead, who has studied restoring mobility in paralyzed rats and whose current research on spinal cord injuries yielded the world’s first-ever embryonic stem cell treatment to be tested in humans. Now 31, Cohen says she truly found her calling. “If I can walk again, that will be wonderful. But I’m in love with stem cells because they can cure other diseases as well.”