Curing cancer and running marathons are only a small part of her history.

“A Chinese girl epitomizes the American dream,” said Dr. Conrad Gubera, professor of sociology.

Victoria Liu, a 2001 biology graduate, moved to Joplin from Chengdu, China.

“I can only describe her as courageous,” said Dr. James Jackson, professor of biology. “She was orphaned in China and pulled herself up by the bootstraps by working for an American company and now she is doing ground-breaking work in cancer research.”

Liu received her associate’s degree in English when she was 19 and started working for the American company Lucent in China.

During her second year there, she became friends with her boss Bob Gates, originally from Joplin. He convinced her to apply to his alma mater, Missouri Southern.

In 1996 Liu’s mother died of colon cancer and the following year her cousin died of liver cancer.

Liu applied, was accepted and moved to Joplin in the summer of 1997.

Gubera was a former classmate of Gates and took Liu “under his wing.”

She was a business major her first semester at Southern and worked for James Gray, instructor of business, at the Small Business Development Center. However, she was taking a general biology course under Jackson.

“I was lecturing and said that if you do great research in five to six years you alleviate more pain than 100 physicians can,” Jackson said. “I could visibly see that thought strike her. A different day I was discussing how by changing genes you can stop suffering and again I saw her really moved.”

Jackson convinced her to change her major to biology, if only for a semester, to try it out.

“I remember taking genetics, chemistry and advanced mathematics classes the next semester and I was hooked,” Liu said. “I later took an internship at the University of Texas-Houston in research and it was amazing.”

The first time Liu took her GRE she failed, but her senior year at Southern she had mostly lower division classes left, studied hard and passed the GRE the second time.

“I applied to five different grad schools and was accepted at four,” Liu said.

She decided on Northwestern University in Chicago because of its research program.

Her field is translation research – a mixture of clinical research (on humans) and basic research.

“If we are successful in curing cancer in animals than we will begin to work on humans,” Liu said. “My boss, Chung Lee, is a principal investigator and has been at Northwestern for more than 30 years.

I work in the Urology department on prostate cancer. We work with TGF-Beta (transforming growth factor beta). Cancer produces a lot of TGF-beta that suppresses the immune system. We try to make the immune systems insensitive to the TGF-beta.”

Jackson said he thought Liu would go far.

“She’s clever, works hard, and her prestigious research is beneficial to society,” Jackson said.

Cancer research aside, Liu also trains for marathons twice a week.

Some people in her lab had run the Chicago marathon before and she started to train with them for five months.

“Victoria is truly a physical and mental athlete,” Gubera said.

On Oct. 9, she ran her first marathon of 26.2 miles in three hours and 57 minutes.

The marathon had 40,000 participants with only 33,000 finishing the race. Her time was in the top 9,000.

Liu is in training to qualify for the Boston marathon. She has to cut her time by 17 minutes down to three hours 40 minutes to qualify.

“She really knows how to go for the gold,” Gubera said.

Liu said she is a proud alumna and has her diploma framed on her wall.

“I would recommend Southern to anyone,” she said. “Everyone was very helpful here. Southern prepared me to achieve my goals.”