Gabrielle Valles ’16’s babies were tiny and helpless. She was a sophomore at Wingate, still a teenager, and she had the burden of keeping these little creatures alive.

“I would have to go in on the weekends and at night to take care of my cells,” she says. “I would have to plan my vacations and trips around my science.”

Valles was studying the effect the drug Metformin had on breast-cancer cells. She took her job seriously. She had to: If she neglected the cells, they would die, and the research would end. By this point for Valles, not having ongoing research to do was akin to not having enough oxygen to inhale.

While other students were cheering on the Bulldog football team, going to the movies or taking trips to Charlotte, Valles was in the lab, mothering and studying her cells. And she loved every minute of it.

For three years, Valles, an honors student at Wingate, worked as a research assistant for Dr. Melissa Fox, associate professor of biology. “In some ways you would have viewed her as not just a student learning,” Fox says. “She was also the lab manager, maintaining everything.”

“It wasn’t a major project, but she made it feel important, and it made me feel I was contributing something to the field,” Valles says. “I really invested in it personally.”

On July 26, Fox Zoomed in as her former student defended her dissertation, earning a Ph.D. in molecular biology and biophysics from Fox’s alma mater, the University of Connecticut.

At UConn Health, Valles did her mentor proud. She was published four times and was a standout student while studying isothermal titration calorimetry, site-directed mutagenesis, NMR spectroscopy and other nearly unpronounceable subjects.

She also fell in love with teaching, earning UConn Health’s Biomedical Sciences Service Award for Mentorship, and she received its Leadership Award for promoting diversity and inclusion in STEM fields.

Encouraging one of her students to follow in her footsteps at UConn was a dicey proposition for Fox. “Sending one of your own, in some ways it’s like, ‘Did I raise them right? Are they going to think I did a good job?’” Fox says. “I never doubted Gabi.”

Birds of a feather

Fox and Valles began their Wingate journeys in the fall of 2012, and their careers have been remarkably parallel.

Fox was a young Valles once upon a time. As a freshman pre-med major in the honors program at Union College, a small liberal-arts school in New York, she was required to do a research project. “I didn’t even understand what research really meant,” she says. “That’s what changed my whole trajectory: by being forced into the opportunity.”

Fox was quickly hooked on research, even if studying hydrocarbon sensors was miles away from the biomedical field that held her interest. She could have been researching water pollution or the migratory patterns of unladen swallows for all she cared.

“Research, it’s all the same regardless of the field,” she says. “It’s a process, and once I knew I was really enjoying that process, I switched over to more of a biochemistry field for the rest of my undergrad and went from there.”

Pretty soon she’d ditched the idea of going to medical school altogether. She was going to be a researcher. Research, Fox says, is where the dry book-learning that constitutes so much of a college education springs to life.

It’s where her brain really engages.

“It’s fun, because you get to design these experiments yourself, as long as you have the desire, the creativity,” Fox says. “A lot of people don’t realize how creative science needs to be. You use these boring foundation facts you’ve learned in your textbook and then you get to be creative and apply them and design these experiments to see how they solve the problem.”

Valles followed pretty much the same path. The Sun Valley High School graduate enrolled at Wingate partially so she could remain close to family and partially because she wanted to become a pharmacist and knew Wingate had a successful School of Pharmacy. The intimate nature of the campus also appealed to her. “It just felt very comfortable very quickly,” she says.

Valles loved Wingate, but as she worked part-time at a local CVS she realized pharmacy might not be in her future.

“Honestly, it kind of started as a crisis, a little bit,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I literally came to Wingate to do pharmacy, and now I don’t want to do pharmacy.’ Like I made a mistake or something.”

She leaned on Fox, who methodically and empathetically walked Valles through her options. As it turns out, Valles essentially wanted to be a late-model version of Fox.

“She felt like a counselor at some point, really trying to ease my anxieties, because I really felt like maybe I had made a career mistake," Valles says. "She was just so smart. I was like, ‘I want to be like you.’”

A mentor and role model

Just as Fox mentored Valles, now Valles has a chance to mentor others. After taking a break to tour Europe, she recently took on a postdoc training fellowship at the prestigious Tufts University in Boston, where she is an instructor and researcher and is learning the ins and outs of teaching.

Valles is excited to be a role model, especially in a field that needs more people like her. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, women of color make up only about 5% of the science and engineering workforce.

“There’s just not many scientists who look like me,” Valles says. “Even at UConn, I’ve been the only minority in my department for the past five years. When I go to Tufts it’ll be the same thing. It’s like the higher you go in academia, the less and less diverse it gets. I’ve been very used to being the only black woman in the room, or the only minority in the room.

“When people see me presenting my research, they’re like, ‘Wow! If someone like you can do it, I can do it too.’ I really liked having that kind of impact just by being me.”

Valles’ goal is to be a structural biologist, which means she’ll examine the structures of proteins. At Tufts she’ll be studying microbiology – “bugs and critters,” she says with a laugh – and one day she hopes to have a lab that “is not afraid to chase after the important questions that affect health and human disease.”

It’ll be a long way from Fox’s cell-culture lab, but that was a good place for her to start. Fox never wanted to work at a “research 1” institution, where the phrase “publish or perish” is more than a cliche, but she did understand how valuable research is to all students, even at a liberal arts school. So she improvised. Without a budget for research specimens, Fox visited a veterinary clinic in Polkton and came away with animal tumors. She also received some materials from UConn.

After a couple of years, she found enough money to assemble a cell-culture lab that had more-modern equipment. That enabled her to begin working with student researchers on projects using breast-cancer cells, with the students meticulously tracking cell growth and spread under a variety of conditions.

But she needed dedicated students to help run it. She’d already been working with Valles and knew she had the right candidate.

“We both had a need,” Fox says. “I needed someone who wanted to learn the ropes of every aspect of the research lab, because I was getting it up and running, and it takes teamwork to make that sort of stuff happen and keep all the cells alive and whatnot. She was really more a teammate than a tutee the whole time, after we trained her. I am very thankful for her and her dedication, because she really set the stage for all the students who have come behind her.”

Valles and the students who have more recently worked on Fox’s research projects – as well as those routinely conducted by other Wingate professors – are getting some of the most important instruction and experience a university education affords them.

“If you are in any scientific field, even if you’re not on the battleground of the research bench, knowing how that data was acquired is critical to being a good medical technician of whatever sort they are,” Fox says. “Really, anybody coming to Wingate looking for some career path in the health sciences should have some research exposure so they understand how tedious it is. It’s one thing to read, ‘Data showed this,’ but to know the grit that it takes and the extreme care that we have to use when we’re designing experiments to make sure it’s valid and we can understand the results properly is absolutely priceless.”

It’s also grueling, and students often have to endure multiple failures before getting something to work. Research develops grit.

Valles had loads of grit by the time she entered UConn.

“Wingate was what, 3,000 students? UConn is ten times bigger,” Valles says. “It did feel intimidating, but I also felt prepared. I knew what it was to work in the lab. I knew what it was to research science. I knew what I was getting myself into, so I didn’t have much of a hard time transitioning. I was used to working on the weekends and nights and holidays and stuff. I felt ready.”

And it wasn’t just Fox’s lab that prepared her.

“I really thrive in intimate environments,” Valles says. “I knew all the professors very early on. They were always around. They were always in their offices. I could just go into the biology building and Dr. Fox would be there, Dr. (Brian) Odom would be there, Dr. (Acchia) Albury. It really just felt like home. I could go in and talk to them, not only about class and science but also my career trajectory, and get that mentoring and guidance. I think that played a big role in my confidence as a scientist to go on to UConn, because I got such great mentoring, and they really did care.

“They would be tough on you, of course. It’s science. Not everyone can do it. It was challenging, but I think I’m a better scientist for it.”