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Field of Study

Senior goalkeeper Julia Nagle has taken lessons she’s learned on the lacrosse field into the lab, where she has succeeded in co-authoring a paper published in one of the nation’s top academic journals.

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.’”

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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.”

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