March 5, 2025

Avery Marquis, Senior Spanish, Biological Sciences and Pre-Veterinary Medicine major, works with testing equipment at the Nebraska Center for Virology. Three undergraduate students from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Vanessa Hubing, Avery Marquis and Chanasei Ziemann, have made exciting discoveries about how the human immune system evolved. In a rare achievement at the undergraduate level, they are co-first authors of two scholarly papers published recently in the Journal of Medical Virology, where they explored how key immune players, called interferon regulatory factors, adapted over millions of years. The students are participants in UNL’s undergraduate research program, UCARE, under the guidance of Luwen Zhang and Etsuko Moriyama, professors with the School of Biological Sciences and associated with the Nebraska Center for Virology. March 5, 2025. Photo by Aaron Nix / UNL University Communication and Marketing.