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.”