Julie Trolle: 'Being willing to say ‘Yes’ has been important to where I have ended up.'
Julie Trolle was 16 years old, living in a boarding school halfway around the world from her family in Copenhagen, and immersed in “the least science-focused years of my schooling.” She was in rural New Mexico at the U.S. campus of United World Colleges, a “global educational movement that brings together students from diverse backgrounds to foster peace and a sustainable future through education,” according to its mission statement.
“There were kids from many other countries, all wanting to have impact, and many of us were on a path to do socially focused work, to do good with our careers,” Trolle said. “So, two friends and I started a social venture in Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland. Remotely, we employed carpentry students at the country’s School for the Deaf to manufacture lap desks for children in under-resourced communities. It was a transformative experience for me, especially at such a young age.”
That “transformative experience” created in Trolle an invaluable lesson on life: If one is willing to look, there are opportunities where one might least expect them.
“Being willing to say ‘Yes’ has been important to where I have ended up.” Trolle said.
Today, Trolle, 33, is one of eight SeaBridge Fellows working at the biotech venture, The Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology (Seattle Hub), incorporating cell and genome programming technologies into their individual research projects in laboratories at the UW or Fred Hutch Cancer Center. With funding from the Washington Research Foundation, each fellow receives two years of financial support, as well as funding for a structured career development curriculum, mentorship training, and networking opportunities. SeaBridge seeks to diversify Seattle Hub technologies into new companies to commercialize novel therapeutics, diagnostics, or other cell-based technologies. The ultimate goal is to offer new clinical interventions to improve patients’ lives.
'I have been driven not only by scientific discovery – but by the application of scientific findings in real-world settings.'
Translating research into improving patients’ lives likely was foremost in Trolle’s mind when she applied last year, as evidenced by this excerpt from her personal statement:
In my career as a molecular biologist, I have been driven not only by scientific discovery – but by the application of scientific findings in real-world settings. I believe there is opportunity to have great impact via translation of fundamental discoveries to applications that are accessible to all….
How did a young social entrepreneur from Copenhagen become a molecular biologist in Seattle? Through a 16-year journey of discovery and being willing to explore new opportunities.
After leaving United World College in New Mexico, Trolle returned to Europe and in 2013 enrolled in Jacobs University (now Constructor University) in Bremen, Germany to study Biochemistry and Cell Biology. In her last year, she was one of only two students selected for the school’s undergraduate summer program at New York University.
“My interests evolved,” Trolle said. “I decided it would be interesting to build things with biology. I thought it was so elegant that we could program cells to do useful things. At the time, there were a lot of stories in the news about programming microbes to make fuels and other products. What excited me was that cells can do complex chemistry under relatively ordinary conditions, without the extreme heat, pressure, or harsh chemicals that conventional chemical processes can require. Instead, you can use the capabilities biology has already evolved and redirect them toward something useful.”
She completed a Bachelor of Science degree in Biochemistry and Cell Biology and retuned in 2017 to NYU’s Langone Health to pursue a Ph.D. in Synthetic Biology, working with Principal Investigator Jef Boeke. Trolle admits her Ph.D. project was “incredibly ambitious” and “a bit of a struggle.”
“We wanted to engineer these nine amino acid pathways in mammalian cells as a rational design metabolic engineering,” she said. “Effectively, we were trying to introduce these genes from bacteria. It was an ambitious ideal. Just import dozens and dozens of these genes and get them to do what they normally would do in a bacteria in their new setting. The problem is, even if we know what genes perform this function in bacteria, we don’t necessarily know how to encode those genes in a suitable way in a mammalian cell. We ran into all these technical problems in getting these genes to work. Out of the nine amino acid pathways, I got to the finish line with just one.”
Comments like “all these technical problems,” and getting one out of nine amino acid pathways “to the finish line” likely would be discouraging to other scientists. But Trolle, after completing her Ph.D. and continuing at NYU as a postdoctoral fellow, saw this as another unexpected opportunity. She launched a collaboration with fellow NYU Langone Health postdoc Sudarshan Pinglay to design and develop a novel gene editing framework – Shotgun Genetic Engineering.
The system enables “fast, efficient metabolic engineering of mammalian cells using barcoded genetic screens.” She was awarded $50,000 from the National Science Foundation to explore Shotgun Genetic Engineering as a potential a startup company. Trolle and Pinglay have a patent pending on the system and, along with Boeke and others, have written a paper that is under review by a peer-reviewed journal.
Coming full circle, as well as 2,800 miles from New York City, Pinglay is now Trolle’s mentor and supervisor as a SeaBridge Fellow at Seattle Hub. He is impressed with her determination.
“I’ve always thought that science rewards persistence above almost anything else,” Pinglay said. “Intelligence and creativity matter, and Julie has both, but what really stands out is her determination to keep going when the science gets difficult. She has demonstrated this through many challenging phases of her work, and I think it will serve her incredibly well throughout her research career. She is also collegial, collaborative, and a wonderful teacher – the kind of scientist you want to root for.”
