Harvard bound: Kathleen Bellon

Kathleen Bellon’s passion for science started at a young age. In second grade at Glacier Gateway Elementary her teacher Mary Ellen Getts urged her to enter the science fair.

Bellon did and she won a bunch of fairs as a youngster.

This fall, Bellon will attend Harvard University to study molecular and cellular biology.

Bellon attended Columbia Falls schools through the eighth grade, but moved to College Station, Texas, where her father Juan had plans to open a restaurant.

The restaurant didn’t work out, but Juan and mom, Nalda, run a successful food truck. Juan was a longtime cook at Tien’s Place when they lived in Columbia Falls.

Bellon graduated this spring with a 4.4 weighted grade point average — the top 5 percent in her class in a school of more than 2,000 students.

She said she really hadn’t considered applying to Ivy League schools until her junior year when she attended a summer program for minority students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The six-week program was extremely challenging, she said.

Through her high school career Bellon has taken challenging classes, including calculus, biophysics and others. Calculus has ended the careers of many aspiring young science aficionados.

But while she was in the program at MIT she decided to apply to Harvard and other schools, because her classmates had targeted those schools as well.

She wasn’t just accepted to Harvard. She was also accepted to Yale, Columbia, Brown and Texas A&M among others.

The one school she didn’t get into was MIT.

Bellon said she still misses the small town feel of Columbia Falls. Her parents are immigrants from Peru and most of her family still lives there.

Bellon said after undergraduate studies she says she hopes to get into a doctorate program in sciences.

“I really like to do research,” she said.