Field of Study

With the Harvard women’s lacrosse team opening its season this Saturday against cross-town rival Boston University, senior goalie Julia Nagle has a lot on her mind—but it’s not all X’s and O’s.  It’s DNA and RNA too.

Nagle, the Crimson’s backup goalkeeper, has become quite the expert on retroviral protein translation and is currently working on her thesis about just that.

Not many students, let alone successful athletes, can boast that they are published authors in one of the most read and well-respected science journals in the world. Then again, Nagle isn’t one to boast, either.  Yet her paper, published in “Nature” last November and co-authored by six other scientists, on a retroviral mRNA switch speaks for itself.

But just two years ago, this kind of success seemed unlikely.

Nagle’s story began in a situation most Harvard students can either relate to or have learned to empathize with.  As a sophomore pre-med concentrating in Molecular and Cellular Biology, Nagle found herself struggling with her newly declared concentration.  She was unhappy and feeling like MCB wasn’t the right fit.

But the summer after sophomore year, a close family friend, Dr. Michele Evans, invited Nagle to intern at the National Institutes of Health. Working as a swim league official, Evans got to know Nagle as a young swimmer, and she certainly didn’t think it would take much to renew Nagle’s childhood interest in science.

“I simply invited her to come visit my lab and the students who were working in the institute for the summer as they presented their work at our annual poster day,” Evans wrote via email. “I think she got a lot out of the visit as she talked to the students from all over the country.  I think that this visit revived her interest.”

And that revival extended throughout Nagle’s entire internship, allowing her to come back to Harvard ready and enthusiastic to pursue MCB.

“I went into [the internship] not knowing what to expect or being really excited,” Nagle remembered. “But I really did love it, and coming back at the start of junior year, I was excited about MCB again. The internship definitely made me fall in love with the subject again.”

With a rekindled passion for biology and a desire to continue research, Nagle quickly found a lab on campus under principle investigator Dr. Victoria D’Souza, and with her training at the NIH, she was able to jump in right away.

But that didn’t mean that balancing schoolwork, working in a lab, and playing lacrosse came easy.  Luckily for Nagle, D’Souza was very understanding.

“[D’Souza] was very chill about me playing lacrosse and was very flexible about my schedule,” Nagle recounted. “She was very flexible about giving me the freedom to take the project myself and get it done on my own time and report to her, so there were a lot of odd hours going in to the lab.”

How was it all possible?

A humble Nagle thinks it’s just a small degree of time management.  But Michael Durney, a collaborating author and post-doc in D’Souza’s lab, attributed it to more than that.

“Julia has an awesome work ethic and is very dedicated.” Durney wrote via email. “She focuses on what’s important, understands what needs to be done, and gets on with the job. She manages her time really well, especially considering how much practice her sport requires.”

That’s not all that Nagle brought to the lab from the field—standing over six feet tall, Nagle impressed Durney with her ability to reach objects at the top of lab’s freezer and she was known around the lab for her “colorful sneakers and jackets”.

But there was a time when Nagle was unsure of whether she could afford the time to continue lacrosse. What she didn’t know as she soon found herself running experiments between classes and practices, was that her decision to stick with lacrosse was invaluable.

“There have been points over the past years where lacrosse has held things together. Struggling to figure things out sophomore year academically, lacrosse was still there day in and day out for me.” Nagle said.  “And it gave me that consistency when I needed it. Coming back junior year, it was tough to figure out whether I really wanted and was able to do both research and lacrosse. But if lacrosse had supported me so much sophomore year, it wasn’t really fair to dip out.”

Her odd hours soon paid off when, in March 2011, a busy lacrosse schedule kept Nagle on campus during spring break.  Whatever time she wasn’t spending on the field, she was spending in the lab. And by the end of the week, Nagle had finally gotten the results that D’Souza was waiting for.

Nagle recalled D’Souza asking, “‘Why didn’t you go home for spring break? Why are you still here? Please tell me it’s not just to finish this project.’ And I had to tell her, ‘No we still have practice every day so I wouldn’t be home anyway.’”

Once her part of the project was finished, Nagle could only wait until the lab’s paper, “An equilibrium-dependent retroviral mRNA switch regulates translational recoding” was published in Nature, with her name listed alongside D’Souza, Durney, and several others as a primary author.

But her performance in the lab and on the field are not mutually exclusive. Nagle explained that she has applied skills and knowledge she’s learned from sports to research and vice versa.

“In research, most of your stuff ends up failing; you get your results back, and it didn’t work,” she said. “But it’s more about how do you look at that, how do you go back and fix it? And that’s something that lacrosse teaches you.  In practice, inevitably you’re going to mess up…. You drop that pass, now go get it back and string a couple of goods together—that’s what our coach always tells us.  If a project doesn’t work, you just keep going and don’t lose sight of your goal.”

Evans agreed that Nagle’s perseverance is paramount to her success in the lab.

“Julia is quiet but a deep thinker,” Evans wrote. “She worked hard and was not afraid for some experiments just not to work.  Understanding that sometimes the best-planned experiments just do not work is critical in science. Her persistence was very important.”

Her success in the lab doesn’t go unnoticed by her teammates, either.  Co-captain—and creator of Nagle’s nickname, “Nagle-Bomb”—Melanie Baskind said that Nagle has become an invaluable role-model for student athletes and young women at Harvard.

“Julia is a great example of someone who’s really committed to her academics outside of sports. And I think it makes it really easy for other girls on the team when they’re younger or going through the recruiting process to see that that can be done,” said Baskind, who also works in a lab.  “Every year there are more and more people asking us how we manage our lab schedules [and] how we’re dealing with lots of problem sets when we’re away.  And I just think it makes it easier when you have role models that have had success doing it in the past. And Julia is the primary example of that.”