Building a Life in Brussels, One Experiment (and One Train Ticket) at a Time

This summer, I was incredibly fortunate to be selected for the BRAVO! program, through which I designed and proposed my own international collaboration with Dr. Mélody Cools's laboratory at the Institut de Recherche LABIRIS in Brussels, Belgium. It was my first time leaving the United States, and I could not have picked a more meaningful way to do it.

In Brussels, I extended the research I have been doing back home in the Capaldi Lab at the University of Arizona, where I study TORC1, a nutrient-sensing pathway that tells a cell whether to grow or conserve its resources. In Brussels, I focused on a transporter protein called Vsb1, which moves the amino acid arginine into the vacuole, a compartment inside the cell that stores nutrients for later use and mitigates toxicity. I adapted a fluorescent ratiometric probe, a glowing sensor, to work in yeast and developed an assay using it to measure arginine levels inside the cell in real time. This assay led me to be able to show that Vsb1 is required both to restore normal arginine levels after starvation and to release arginine from the vacuole when the cell is under stress. 

In my final two weeks, I ran some of the most exciting experiments of the whole summer, testing whether this transporter's function connects back to the TORC1 pathway my Arizona lab studies. The results confirmed that it does, specifically through the GTPases associated with the complex, and let me rule out a competing hypothesis I had been testing all summer. That feeling made the whole summer worth it, to watch a question I designed myself, from the grant proposal all the way to the final data, actually come together, and this project has already laid the groundwork for a continued collaboration between the Cools and Capaldi labs.

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Beyond the lab, living completely on my own in a country where I did not speak the language was hard, but also one of the most transformative things I have ever done. I still remember my first day in Brussels, when I could barely work up the courage to leave my apartment, completely overwhelmed by the idea of navigating an unfamiliar country entirely by myself. That fear did not last. By the end of the summer, I had built an entire life for myself in a small suburb outside the city, learned the metro, found my favorite coffee shops, and grown to genuinely love the slower pace of European life.

One of my best moments of the summer was hopping on a train by myself for a solo weekend in Paris, wandering the city on my own itinerary with no plans and no schedule, just me and a map. Ever since I was a child, Paris has been my dream place to visit, and it definitely lived up to my expectations. I also took a trip to Cambridge, England, where I got some much-needed time with friends from back home, we explored punting on the canal, picnicked with the local cows and swans, and even met up with a fellow BRAVO! student. Closer to home, I explored Bruges, Antwerp, Ghent, and the coastal town of Blankenberge on day trips from Brussels, and closed out my summer with one final loop through Amsterdam, Hamburg, Berlin, and London before flying home.

If you had told younger me that I would spend a summer living entirely on my own in a foreign country, coordinating a research collaboration across two continents, and somehow becoming comfortable with solo traveling around Europe, I am not sure I would have believed you. I am walking away from this summer with more than new lab skills. I am walking away having proven to myself that I can build a life from scratch, in a place where I know no one, and come out the other side more independent, more confident, and more certain than ever that this is the career I want to spend the rest of my life building. I am endlessly grateful to BRAVO! and its donors, to Dr. Cools and Dr. Capaldi, and to UBRP for making this summer possible.

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