Biology faculty mentors nurture publishable skills in the lab

Biology faculty mentors nurture publishable skills in the lab

Sixty-eight biology students since 2013 have earned the rare distinction of published author in academia before earning their degree.

By Janel Shoun-Smith | 615-966-7078 | 05/22/2026

For decades, Lipscomb's biology professors have been exploring potential ways to fight cancer, to fight Crohn's disease, to heal those infected with parasitic worms or to improve the health of premature infants.

Along the way they have instructed and inspired untold numbers of students who went on to medical and science careers. And they also mentored at least 68 who have risen to the level of published authors in the biology field for work completed as undergraduates or master's level students.

Lipscomb's modern age of student authorship in biological lab-based research kicked off in 2013 when eight undergraduate students were named as authors on an article by Dr. Beth Conway (LA '98), now associate chair and professor of biology, published in Angiogenesis. The article outlined a new pathway to angiogenesis, the growth of blood vessels, which can be used by cancer cells to fuel their growth.

Conway has spent 24 years studying proteins that encourage blood vessel growth to tumors, a topic particularly relevant to triple negative breast cancer, the most difficult type of breast cancer to treat.

In 2016, 10 students were named as authors on another article by Conway, published in the journal Oncogenesis. For that article, she and students looked at the protein Neprilysin, normally found in healthy breast tissue, but not present in cancer cells. The team found that the more breast cancer can shut down Neprilysin and its function, the more aggressive the cancer tended to be and the worse the prognosis, said Conway.

Following that study, 16 students were named as authors in a third article by Conway published in the Journal of Cancer. Leading up to that article, Conway and student researchers examined the four main types of the Endothelin B receptor protein and how each type varied in its presence and function in breast cancer.

The latest publication with student authors was released in April, when Dr. Brian Ellis, associate professor of biology, had seven years of work on a worm called C. elegans culminate in a published article in the open access journal PLOS One (Proceedings of Library Science). The article included 18 Lipscomb undergraduate and graduate students named as authors along with Ellis.

And more are in the works, with both Conway and Dr. Josh Owens, associate professor, expecting to complete experiments this summer and submit new articles for publication soon after. At least 17 students could earn a citation for their name once those research studies are published.

In the sciences, it is particularly difficult for a student to be included as an author on a paper because authors must substantially contribute to the paper by either developing the study design, running the experiments, completing the data analysis or writing part of the manuscript.

Few bachelor's, or even master's programs, allow students to independently conduct these major portions of bench science research studies. Lipscomb's biology department, however, uses a model that allows students to take on both developing and conducting experiments themselves, at three skill levels over the course of their bachelor's studies.

This model results in many more undergraduate studies, as well as master's students in biomolecular science, made eligible for authorship status on academic journal articles.

Seeking new ways to prevent infection

Ellis' 2026 article is the latest work in his goal to help find a more efficient and effective way to prevent people in high-poverty areas from becoming infected with parasitic worms.
His hypothesis is that there may be a way to kill parasitic worms in the environment before they infect people, as opposed to the current best treatment practice which is to treat an entire population with drugs without knowing whether each individual is actually infected or not.

"There are 1.5 billion people in the world infected with parasitic worms, with three main types: hookworm, Ascaris and whipworm," said Ellis. "They don't typically kill you, but they make you tired, and if you're tired, you don't go to school as often. So you don't get a good education, you don't get a good job, and it's more likely you will stay in poverty."

Before coming to Lipscomb, Ellis' team had used later staged C. elegans, another type of worm used as a model of parasitic worms, to measure their reaction to the drug of choice used by global officials in Mass Drug Administrations (MDA) to cure people of parasitic worm infections.

Ellis found that the drug Albendazole, the gold standard for MDA, does make C. elegans sick, which resulted in the researchers developing a scoring system categorizing how sick or healthy worms are. That research was published in 2017 in PLOS One.

Building on that work at Lipscomb, Ellis asked what would happen if the drugs were introduced earlier in the C. elegans life cycle, such as in the first larval stage, which would model hookworm in the soil, before they infect humans.

Through lab experiments, Ellis and his students found that the primary drugs used today were about as effective on the worms in a younger larval stage. They outlined those results in the PLOS One paper and suggested that further studies to determine which drugs are most effective at various stages of the worm's life would be beneficial to developing treatments, given that people are infected with the worms at various larval stages.

"We're suggesting that a novel pre-infective control, by spraying the soil, in areas where high amounts of worms are located, is something that we would want to explore in the future," said Ellis.

Using the three-tier model of incorporating students into the lab, Lipscomb students conducted all the experiments for this paper, said Ellis, and Sam A. Attalla (BS '23), the first author, did multiple experiments and wrote the first rough draft of the paper as an undergraduate student. He is now in medical school at the University of Tennessee Health Sciences in Memphis.

The school year is not long in terms of research, as students only have a small window each semester that doesn't conflict with holidays, summer vacation and other scheduling conflicts, said Ellis. But the Lipscomb students who authored the article developed the skills and knowledge to consistently replicate each other's data and gave Ellis confidence that the data was correct, he said.

Fighting triple negative breast cancer

Conway began her breast cancer research 15 years ago wanting to better understand what makes some breast cancers more invasive and metastatic than others, and students have been a part of the research efforts since the beginning of her studies.

In fact, "At the beginning of the Endothelin B receptor protein study, a student suggested that we really needed to be looking at this protein, and I hadn't been looking at it before but had been looking at something else in that family," she admitted. "I just love that as an example not just of how we can learn more about breast cancer, but about how students and researchers can push each other to see things that I wouldn't have seen on my own."

From 2015 to 2020, Conway and student researchers examined the four main types of the Endothelin B receptor protein. The protein's widespread presence in epithelial cells and its increased presence and impact in some tumors has prompted investigation into their ability to regulate cancer progression, Conway explained.

Conway and her student researchers assessed the mRNA role of the major endothelin B receptor gene (EDNRB) isoforms and found differences in both mRNA and protein functions in normal breast cells and breast cancer cell lines.

"Sometimes different forms of protein will actually have different functions. So we wanted to know if these four main forms of Endothelin B receptor varied in their function in breast cancer, especially triple negative breast cancer cells," she said.

Since 2020, Conway and her students have pivoted back to studying the protein Neprilysin, and have made surprising discoveries that Conway hopes to get published within the year.

Scientists know that Neprilysin seems to prevent cancer from at least spreading, but in the experiments in Conway's lab, the protein appeared to be increasing the cancer that flows through an important pro-cancer signaling pathway called the pi3 kinase pathway.

"Those two things were oxymorons. Neprilysin is activating this pathway that normally we think of as promoting cancer, but Neprilysin is somehow inhibiting cancer. So we dug into that a little deeper," said Conway.

Drawing from existing research from other labs, the team honed in on a protein called AKT1, which sometimes regulates breast cancer metastasis by countering AKT2.

"So we thought well, if Neprilysin is somehow favoring the activation of AKT1 over AKT2, then that could make sense of all these different puzzle pieces," said Conway. "So in the last year, that's really where we've been focused, trying to run experiments to test that hypothesis."

A paper covering this work is almost ready to be submitted, said Conway, with Mirna Mina Abouda (BS '19, MS '22) listed as first author and Ellie Griner (BS '26), Ariadna Menjivar (BS '25) and Kai Lam, rising senior, having carried out the most recent lab work.

"Ellie and Kai have taken this research to the next level," said Conway. "Ellie pushed through a really difficult protocol, and Kai had many ideas about experiments we could conduct. Together, they have brought us to a better understanding of what's going on."

The latest generation of contributing authors

Mass drug administration approved and candidate anthelmintics beginning on larval stage 1 Caenorhabditis elegans are generally potent, suggesting a novel, pre-infective control for helminths, Brian Ellis, PLOS One, 2026

• Sam A. Attalla (BS '23), published first author
• Justin R. Hockaday (BS '25)
• Raegan Weatherly (BS '24)
• Malia B. Asselin (BS '25)
• William A. Huff Jr. (BS '21)
• Mason H. Long (LA '20, A '22)
• Anna K. Thurman (BS '24)
• Audrey L. Cox (BS '26)
• Giselle Domingo Diaz (BS '25)
• Morgan Pfeffer (MS '22)
• Allison K. Lewis (BS '20, MS '21)
• Viveke Rai (MS '20)
• Tashna Placide (MS '21)
• Kala R. Pearce (MS '22)
• Leopold N. Nkengbeza (MS '21)
• Jasmine Carter (MS '20)
• Nathan Stein (MS '20)
• Sam Fischer (MS '22)
  

Beth Conway's Lab

• Mirna Mina Abouda (BS '19, MS '22), potential first author
• Edom Seyoum (BS '21, MS '22)
• Ellie Griner (BS '26)
• Kai Lam, senior
• Adriana Menjivar (BS '25)
• Caleb Reagor (BS '19)
• Reed Haga (MS '20)
• Andrew Stai (BS '22)
• Lily Dao (BS '22)
• Jazmine Stubblefield (MS '19)
• Mariam Iskandar (BS '24)
• Christian Yang (BS '25)

Josh Owens' Lab

• Braxton Ivie (BS '26), potential first author
• Audrey Birdwell (BS/BA '25)
• Lincoln Brown (BS '25)
• Carolyn Tran (BS '25)
• Bryson Lovorn, junior

The previous generations of contributing authors (since 2013)

Differences in endothelin B receptor isoforms expression and function in breast cancer cells, Beth Conway, Journal of Cancer, 2020

• Meena Halaka
• Zuhaila A. Hired
• Grace E. Rutledge
• Carly M. Hedgepath
• Michael P. Anderson
• Haley St. John
• Jessica M. Do
• Parth R. Majmudar
• Caleb Walker
• Asma Alawawdeh
• Hannah M. Stephen
• Caleb C. Reagor
• Jeanette Aderet,
• Kiara Jamison
• Katherine P. Iglesias
• Khadija Z. Kirmani
  

Epigenetic suppression of neprilysin regulates breast cancer invasion, Beth Conway, Oncogenesis, 2016

• Hannah M. Stephen,
• Rammiz J. Khoury
• Parth R. Majmudar
• Taylor Blaylock
• Kailee Hawkins
• Marina S. Salama
• Meghan D. Scott
• Brenna Cosminsky
• Nipun K. Utreja
• Jared Brit
  

Prostate specific membrane antigen produces pro-angiogenic laminin peptides downstream of matrix metalloprotease-2, Beth Conway, Angiogenesis, 2013

• Kyle Joiner
• Alex Patterson
• David Bourgeois
• Robert Rampp
• Benjamin C Hannah
• Samantha McReynolds
• John M Elder
• Hannah Gilfilen