Madison Marsh, the active duty U.S. Air Force officer who recently graduated from the Air Force Academy and was crowned Miss America in 2024’s Miss America pageant, recently appeared on Fox News Channel’s “America Reports” and explained how she wants to use her new role to continue her commitment to the military and encourage others to serve.
Speaking to America Reports about her life and focus on service, Ms. Marsh, just 22 years old, explained how the Air Force helped her not only serve her country, but make it to Harvard, where she hopes to work on using Artificial Intelligence to detect cancer early on and save more people. She pursues that goal because her mother died of cancer at a young age.
In her comments to “America Reports,” the US Air Force officer who was the winner of Miss Colorado and Miss America explained how she hoped to mesh the roles to help encourage others to serve, saying, “We’re really trying to mesh both of these roles together, as me remaining on active duty and maybe potentially becoming a recruiter for the Air Force.”
Continuing, she explained how the leadership opportunities of the Air Force helped her grow as a person and see new ways she could use her fame and position to push for good, saying, “Along the way, I’ve learned all of the leadership opportunities and especially what I can do as Miss America.”
And, explaining how the Air Force helped her get where she is in life, not only by teaching her leadership but by providing tools with which she could achieve her dreams, Ms. Marsh told “America Reports” that she “wouldn’t be able to be Miss America or even gone to Harvard without the opportunities that the Air Force provided.”
Explaining why that is the case and how the Air Force helped her, she said, “They gave me all of the tools at the Air Force Academy to compete in pageants, to get the scholarships I received, to send me to Harvard while I’m still active duty.”
She then returned to the topic of how being in her position gives her the ability to advocate for what she believes in, namely the importance of military service. She said, “So we really want to mesh these two roles together, so I can advocate for people that are armed service members and really try to get more people to join the service.”
That help might be needed, as the military is facing a severe recruitment crisis as fewer and fewer people sign up for the force and many Americans are screened out of participating because of drug use, health issues, or mental health problems.
Marsh also explain why she is a pancreatic cancer researcher at Harvard, using AI to detect it early on, saying that her mother died of it and she wants to help fight it. She said, “She died when she was 41 years old. We had no cancer history. She was really healthy. She didn’t have any of those high-risk factors, and she still passed away.”
She added, “I want to be able to provide hope for other families and really push in every sector down from congressional up to research and funding to ensure that everyone is being taken care of. Because if my mom can’t get to be here, I want to ensure that other families get to have their moms, brothers, sisters, fathers, you name it. That’s the type of person that I want to be for my mom.”
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