Note: This story is part of an ongoing series profiling graduate students in the School of Life Sciences. Read the last feature here.

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No one likes the flu, but Brandon Favre takes hating it to another level. 

“ASU Health Services did me dirty when I was an undergrad, and totally botched my flu vaccine. And I was like, I’m gonna make it so I don’t have to get flu vaccines anymore, and just try to cure the flu.”

The flu is a rapidly-mutating virus, which allows it to adapt to the vaccines that teams of scientists create each year, and persist beyond them. That’s why everyone’s supposed to get their flu shot each year: to prevent against the latest iteration of flu virus. But Favre hopes to create a vaccine that can outsmart the pesky virus.

“I’m making a vaccine against the flu called Final Boss,” he declared.

Though it might not count as “curing” the flu, Favre is working to create a vaccine that targets the regions of the flu virus that don’t mutate from one year to the next. 

“We basically took a target on the flu virus that normally the immune system just kind of ignores. Because it doesn’t change between seasons, we finally have a conserved target to go after.”

Favre has identified 13 areas of the flu virus that tend to stick around from season to season. His Final Boss vaccine targets all of those areas at once. Now, he’s just waiting to get funding so he can test the Final Boss out.

Another point of pride for Favre is that he’s created the Final Boss––as well as other vaccine platforms he’s helped develop––entirely using plants.

“Plants can make complex proteins, and they’re also dirt cheap. You just need some seed funding––but I’ll leave the plant puns alone.” 

On top of being cheap, it’s easy to produce a whole lot of plants at once. If scientists started using them more for vaccine products, Favre says, one day producing and distributing vaccines might also happen on a faster and larger scale. 

In his spare time, Favre has spent his entire PhD staying deeply involved in student government. He’s served in ASU’s Graduate Student Government for six of the last seven years, during which he helped create a grant to cover graduate students’ publication costs, and also has spent years serving on the SOLS E-board, helping create the mental health coordinator position. 

“I really care about the SOLS community,” he explains, “SOLS is probably the reason why ASU is number one in innovation. The coolest research happens here.” 

Favre has felt that way since he was an undergraduate at ASU. Like many others, he initially planned to go to medical school, but got pulled in by the cutting-edge research he saw. 

“SOLS was just like, ‘Yo, check this out: we make plants glow in the dark, we grow vaccines in plants, we have zebrafish that are regenerating their faces.’ And I was like ‘Oh, I wanna be a part of that.” 

So, Favre committed to doing a PhD, though he still wanted to do work with medical applications. 

“I still want to help people’s health, I want to solve big problems. But I feel like the only way to solve huge problems is to take moonshots at diseases like the flu, and see if it works out.” 

The School of Life Sciences' pioneering online research course, “Behavioral and Molecular Analysis of Honey Bees,” engages students in hands-on scientific exploration from anywhere in the world. The course isn’t just about watching bees - professors Hong Lei and Cahit Ozturk co-instruct the course and provide a unique opportunity for students to conduct real-world research through live, 4k-capable web camera feeds of beehives. Students in the course design and conduct original research projects on bee behaviors, analyzing data on temperature, humidity and hive activity to understand how environmental factors impact bee behavior.

In just seven weeks, students complete a cycle based on observations of bees in an “observation hive” — a unique hive with glass walls that allows viewers to watch bees as they perform daily activities, from the famous waggle dance to foraging and hive maintenance. This includes observation, data collection, and analysis. At the end of the course, they present their findings in a manuscript format, some even posting their work on Open Science Framework for public access. For students, this course doesn’t just end with a grade — it leaves them with a lasting piece of scientific work.

This virtual lab experience offers students the opportunity to collect and analyze real data. Marilyn Roberts, a senior majoring in biological sciences with a concentration in ecology and conservation, described the course as pivotal in helping her develop essential research skills. “I expected it to be more like virtual biology labs, where everything is simulated,” she said. “But it wasn’t like that at all. I came up with my own questions, collected my own data and ran analyses through software. I genuinely felt like I was doing research, just as I would in person.”

Roberts’ project explored the activity levels of forager bees during the winter to determine if they store extra honey in preparation for the harsh Arizona summers. “I monitored the forager bees returning to the hive over a period of days, sometimes using specialized software to count them, and analyzed the data alongside temperature readings,” Roberts said. “Though I couldn’t prove my hypothesis definitively, I found enough interesting trends to suggest there’s more to investigate.” 

Her newfound confidence in research even inspired her to present her findings at ASU’s undergraduate symposium, where she earned an honorable mention. “Research was always intimidating to me, but this course gave me so much confidence,” Roberts shared.

“It’s incredibly rewarding to see how engaged the students are,” said Lei. “They get to experience the entire research process — from question formulation to manuscript writing. Some of our students, like Mariana Bustamonte, have even used this course to strengthen their applications to graduate programs.”

Mariana Bustamante took the course while living in Belgium. “I didn’t know I could be a researcher until I joined this class,” Bustamante explained. “I never knew that was an option for my life, and it opened a bunch of new doors for my future.” Her research focused on “undertaker” bees, a subset of honey bees responsible for removing dead or diseased bees from the hive. She observed how temperature fluctuations impacted their efficiency and noticed that colder temperatures led to higher rates of “mistakes,” as undertaker bees occasionally left deceased bees in the hive. “This sparked my interest in how temperature might affect cognitive abilities in insects,” Bustamante said.

Students’ research experiences are made possible by the seamless support Lei provides in response to their requests. “If I emailed Dr. Lei about needing a camera movement or a temperature change, by the next day, the adjustments were made,” Bustamante noted. Roberts echoed this, mentioning the flexibility in camera setups that allowed her to track her bees’ movements efficiently.

The course has been a huge success, quickly reaching maximum enrollment each term and recently expanding to include graduate students. Ozturk, who works on ASU’s Polytechnic campus has worked with bees for over 30 years. He ensures that the hive environment is optimal for observation. “We make sure everything is ready for students to collect data remotely,” he said, emphasizing the dedication behind the scenes that makes this virtual research possible. “We open the hives, check on their health and ensure everything is ready for students to collect data remotely.”

Reflecting on the experience, Roberts shared her appreciation for the unique opportunity ASU provides to online students: “ASU’s undergraduate research program is phenomenal, and having these opportunities available to online students is invaluable. I can’t imagine having this experience anywhere else.”

Lei and Ozturk are now looking forward to their next cohort, which will include graduate students as well. “Research opportunities have traditionally been limited to students physically on campus, but with the growing demand for online education, we wanted to offer online students authentic, original research experiences,” Lei said, “This has been truly a great team effort, with generous support from Kevin Tinnin and David Roman who volunteered to design and implement the network architecture, the OURS program from The College, TLC and SOLUR from SOLS and Shawn Mahoney as TA.”

“We’re excited to see how much further we can push this project,” Ozturk added. “It’s inspiring to think about the doors this could open for online students who want a real taste of scientific research.”

School of Life Sciences students ElanaGrace Fernandez and Nabhan Fakrudin are working hard - on and off campus. Through the undergraduate advising office at SOLS, Fernandez and Fakrudin scored internships in their desired career field as undergraduate students. 

Fernandez, an ASU Online student through the Starbucks College Achievement program is majoring in biological sciences and hopes to one day be a dentist and own her own practice. Since October 2023, she has been interning at Comfort Dental in San Diego as a dental assistant. Through her internship, she not only has sharpened her technical skills, she’s also learned a lot about the type of dentist she wants to be, and how she hopes her patients will feel when they sit down at the chair in front of her. 

To achieve her career goals, Fernandez plans on taking after the dentist at the practice she’s interning at. In a business where it patients can feel like they're being nickel and dimed, Fernandez wants to follow in her mentor's footsteps and create trust between she and her patients. She recalls one of her most memorable moments assisting him with an elderly patient who had an unexpected turn of events during what was supposed to be a routine procedure. “When the procedure was over, he told the patient honestly, ‘that was like opening a can of worms, to be frank with you,” Fernandez says. The doctor told him that “he'd treat the patient like his own father,” saying “‘I’m not looking at this like an opportunity for money. You’re a patient who’s part of our family.’” Fernandez hopes that her future patients feel like they’re being treated like family - not just any other patient. 

While working full-time, pursuing her education and participating in an internship, Fernandez says that the best advice she can give is to “enjoy everything that comes with the journey and prioritize your mental health. Through discipline, motivation and taking care of yourself, it is possible to do all these things at once and achieve your goals.”

Fakrudin has studied on ASU’s Tempe campus for four years and will be graduating in May with his bachelor’s of science in molecular bioscience and biotechnology (MBB). At the beginning of his collegiate career, he started at ASU majoring in aerospace engineering. Shortly after starting at ASU, “my grandparents were diagnosed with debilitating life conditions - Parkinson's and Alzheimer's - which was largely the big influence that led me to switch to MBB,” Fakrudin said. 

During his time as an undergraduate student in SOLS, Fakrudin has held two internships. His first was at TGen as part of the Helios Scholarship program, a paid, eight-week summer internship program in biomedical research open to incoming and continuing undergraduate, graduate and medical school students who have studied at an Arizona high school, college or university. Interns in this program work full-time on a research project under the mentorship of a TGen scientist to unravel the genetic components of diabetes, neurological disease and cancer.

Currently, Fakrudin is an intern at the University of Arizona’s College of Medicine’s Center for Applied NanoBioscience and Medicine in downtown Phoenix. “I think it's a very interdisciplinary research focused center,” says Fakrudin. “We have things from plant research to cellular research where we grow cells in organ-on-chip systems and designing and developing models for therapeutics that are in clinical testing stages are among many things that we do at the center.”

Specifically, Fakrudin works “on the human blood brain barrier organ on chip system where we use iPSCs that are differentiated into the human blood-brain barrier and we're actually working on an accelerated differentiation pathway to make that faster.”

For students interested in internships, Fakrudin’s advice is to “never stop asking professors and advisors about opportunities or ways to grow your network. In my personal experience, faculty have always been eager to help me make connections or write letters of recommendation. You never know until you ask!”