It would have been understandable if Hailey Belverio ’25 was nervous to present at her first professional conference. After all, the International Gap Junction Conference held in Arlington, Virginia, this July brought together researchers, professors, and doctoral students from some of the world’s top research institutions, and Belverio is an undergraduate from a lesser-known university. But Belverio says she was excited to be “a little fish in a big pond”; represent Moravian University alongside Anastasia Thévenin, associate professor of biology, and Sophia Shienvold ’24; and share their cutting-edge cancer cell research.

“I think people are always kind of caught off guard by seeing that such a small institution has such intensive research going on,” Belverio says. Belverio remembers being instantly drawn to Thévenin’s positivity and patience, deciding within minutes of sitting in her cellular and molecular biology course sophomore year that she wanted to collaborate on research.

“She’s so passionate about her teaching and her research, and that comes out in her lectures. Everything she said made me excited about the topic.”

Thévenin told Belverio that she had applied for a grant through the National Institutes of Health and that if she was accepted, she would take Belverio on as a student in her lab.

Earning the grant meant Thévenin continued studying the differences between healthy cells and cancer cells, and how these cells turn into tumors. “Most of the time the reason that cells turn bad and turn into tumors is because of misregulated proteins—proteins misbehaving within the cells,” Belverio explains. “Our lab is studying cancer-causing proteins and how we can control them with cancer-preventing proteins. Our goal is to identify novel molecular mechanisms that could prevent healthy cells from becoming cancerous.”

Belverio trained intensively in Thévenin’s lab through SOAR (Student Opportunities for Academic Research) during the summer of 2023, completed independent research in her junior year, presented on Scholars Day, and returned to the lab this summer. Now fully trained in Thévenin’s lab for more than a year, she found that attending the conference proved an integral next step.

“[At the conference] people were very impressed with my work, and they were often shocked when I told them that I was an undergraduate student,” Belverio says. “Everyone was so interested in what I had to say, and they asked insightful questions that gave me a new perspective on some of my data. I was also surprised at how many people asked me for my insight.”