Meet Gladstone: Julia Kaye

Julia Kaye (she/her) is a research investigator in the Center for Systems and Therapeutics at Gladstone Institutes. She completed her undergraduate work at UC Santa Cruz, and then went on to receive her PhD from UC Davis, where she studied mechanisms of forms of memory and learning in C. elegans in the lab of Noelle L’Etoile.

What brought you to Gladstone?

I came to Gladstone to do my postdoc work with Steve Finkbeiner, hoping to leverage his innovative microscopy techniques and stem cell models to make transformative insights into the mechanisms underlying neurological diseases.

What do you like about Gladstone?

There are so many wonderful things about Gladstone. I love the community, the mission, the leadership and the brilliant science that’s happening here. I feel very lucky to be here.

I recall going through the COVID pandemic and being amazed and dazzled with the fact that we had the world's experts in virology helping steer the decisions that Gladstone made. It was such a scary time, but being here at Gladstone with a leadership that cared so much about everyone made a world of difference.

Who or what has been your biggest influence in your scientific career?

There have been so many powerful and important influences in my scientific career, but I think probably three people come to mind.

The first is my graduate advisor Noelle L'Etoile. She is one of the most brilliant, amazing, driven, and dedicated scientists that I’ve ever worked with. But that’s not all, she really is one of the kindest, inspiring, and most generous people I’ve ever known. In graduate school I was very insecure, but Noelle always believed in me. She lifted me up and trusted my abilities, and in doing so I began to trust myself as a scientist. I have so much respect and admiration for her that my daughter’s middle name is after her!

The second person is my current boss Steve Finkbeiner. He has had a tremendous influence on the way I think about problems and set out to ask questions. A flaw of mine is to see the bigger picture of scientific challenges. I tend to get stuck in the details—in the weeds of things. Of course, in science, one should be meticulous, careful, focused, determined, and driven by the elements. But in doing all of that, one can miss the forest for the trees. Steve has this amazing capacity to grasp broad scientific knowledge gaps and think creatively about how to unravel them. In doing so, he invests and perceives the “long game.” He helps pull my head out of the sand, and gets me to see the 30,000 foot view. In this way, we make a great team. I trust and respect him very much, and I feel lucky that I’ve been able to work with him for so long.

The third person is my mother. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) when I was seven. Her struggles and suffering caused by MS imprinted in me a fundamental understanding of how devastating neurological diseases can be. It has driven and fueled my passion to understand disorders of the brain and body. I hope that in some small way I can contribute to the foundational knowledge needed to uncover the cellular mechanisms underlying these diseases. And in this way, I hope that my efforts will lead to discoveries that may help find treatments for neurodegeneration and related illnesses.

What do you do when you are not working?

Well, my family would say, “working!” But, I spend time with my daughter and husband and family and friends. I love being outside and I find great joy in nature. I also love traveling, and my favorite thing to do is to surf and be in water.

What is your hidden talent?

I am actually a decent skateboarder, and it's sometimes fun to pull it out and skate like I did when I was young, which I still actually can do! Even if you are a mom, a scientist, or a person filled to the brim of the demands and stresses of everyday life —there should always be times one can act like a kid. Skateboarding makes me feel like I am 10 again!

What advice would you give to young scientists or students interested in your field?

Follow your heart. Follow your passion. Science can be so hard and challenging that if you’re not in love and obsessed with the questions, or what you do on a daily basis, it will make it very difficult to be successful. It’s not worth doing something you don’t love. Find what it is that drives you, what inspires you, and what makes you wake up in the morning driven to tackle your mission.

What are the key areas of research you are focused on?

A key focus of my work has been developing highly faithful models of neurodegenerative diseases using human cells. Ever since the invention of pluripotent stem cell technology, we have had the ability to study cells that come directly from patients with disease. The problem, however, has been that these cultures are naïve— they represent early stages of development and they often don't effectively model the type of cells we're really interested in. I think that has been a very confounding challenge for using iPSCs to model disease effectively. Even still, we’ve been able to capture robust disease-related cellular signatures, as well as uncover pathological cellular mechanisms not previously known. I’m very excited about what the future holds for this technology and how it may lead to drug discovery and also just basic understanding of disease.

I’m also very interested in genomics and understanding the genetic basis of disease development and disease progression. I have been fascinated to learn how genetic variation can modify disease onset or disease outcome for conditions such Huntington’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. In addition, I’ve also been involved in using novel approaches to understand how to capture the complex genetic variation within a person's genome and how we can unravel and make sense of it. We hope to be able to understand how combinations of genetic variants give rise to complex diseases such as ALS and many forms of Parkinson's.

How do you envision the future of your field, especially in terms of disease treatment or prevention?

I’m excited by what genomics can help us understand about our health and our future. We’re unraveling how changes in our DNA alter cells’ ability to combat stress, process toxins, or respond to different molecules.

I see a day when revealing the combination of variants in a person’s genome will allow us to predict how their disease will progress, or how they will respond to treatments. I envision a time in the future (perhaps for my grandchildren) when we’ll know the major genetic risk factors for different disorders. In this way, every person will have the ability to be informed about their health, and have the power to make decisions about how they live their life.

In addition, I envision a scenario in which drugs will be carefully prescribed based on a person's genetic background. This is already happening for certain types of cancers, and I am so excited to see personalized medicine become more of a reality for all kinds of ailments.

Can you provide an example of a successful collaboration that led to significant findings or advancements?

I’ve been lucky to be involved in many collaborations. One of the first collaborations I was part of was the National Institute of Neurological Disease and Stroke (NINDS) Huntington’s Disease iPS Cell consortium, which was one of the first efforts to develop iPS cells from patients with Huntington’s disease in order to generate patient models of disease.

Since then, I’ve been fortunate to be a part of other large consortium efforts. Another one called NeuroLINCS led a pilot study to combine different data types, such whole genome sequencing, RNASeq, and proteomics to find phenotypic signatures of ALS. That work laid the foundation for a much larger, more ambitious, and collaborative effort called Answer ALS that involved the recruitment of over 1000 patients with ALS, and making iPS cells from them and performing many levels of analysis on those cells. The collection of the cells was recently completed, but the efforts to study all of this data are just really beginning. These data and cell lines are available to scientific researchers, and I think it will transform what we know and how we understand ALS in the years to come.