Julia York

Hi Julia! Where in the world are you?

I’m in Punta Arenas. I just got back from Antarctica yesterday and am spending another month here in Chile.

That's so exciting. How did your field season go?

It’s so beautiful there, in the middle of a penguin colony and with icebergs everywhere. It was like a fantasy.

It went great. I joined a Chilean expedition as part of the Fulbright Scholar Program. We went to two different bases, O’Higgins and Julio Escudero. O’Higgins is on the Peninsula and is a Chilean military base. I did most of my fish catching there. It’s so beautiful there, in the middle of a penguin colony and with icebergs everywhere. It was like a fantasy. After that we went to the Julio Escudero Base, which is on King George Island, where I finished up sampling. It was really fun and all the work that's being done there is super interesting. And the Chileans are so nice and so welcoming. It was just great.

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It sounds amazing! What kind of samples were you taking and why?

I work on the notothenioid fish. In the field, I was catching them so I can dissect out the tissues that I think are involved in temperature sensation. This type of work has not yet been done on these fish, but past work on zebrafish shows that the cranial nerves that innervate the face and central parts of the brain are steeply temperature sensitive, while parts like the muscle and liver are not. I want to compare temperature sensing tissue and non-temperature sensing tissue in notothenioid fish. The idea is to sequence those tissues, determine whether the differences in sequences inform which proteins are involved in temperature sensation, and evaluate how these proteins evolved.

I’m also interested in differences between species. To do this, I'm comparing fish in Antarctica with related fish that have independently re-adapted to temperate waters. There are five Antarctic families in the suborder Notothenioidei and they all have a common ancestor that adapted to Antarctica. But since that Antarctic common ancestor first came to be, some fish have escaped back to warmer waters near Chile or New Zealand because the polar front moves north and south over thousands to millions of years. So, the idea is to compare multiple recent independent species pairs of Antarctic and non-Antarctic fish. I'm hoping that I can see some patterns in how that adaptation to different temperature regimes occurred over those species pairs.

That's really cool. I do paleoceanographic research, so that connection to the frontal shifts is super interesting to me. And this was your first time doing fieldwork in Antarctica, right?

Yes, first time in Antarctica.

How long had you been doing Antarctic research without having been in the field?

I started working on the Antarctic fish for my PhD work, so it’s been over seven years now. I did hope that I would be able to go to Antarctica when I started my PhD but turns out it's harder than one would think. So, it didn't really work out those first couple of years, and then the pandemic happened, and it was pretty obvious that a field season wasn't going to happen for my PhD work. Instead, I went to the British Antarctic Survey, in Cambridge, where they have a 0°C aquarium. They gave me some fish to dissect, which is how I got my material for that project. Then, for my postdoc, I applied for a Fulbright and for the NSF-OPP Postdoctoral Research Fellowship as well. And I got them both, which is really great, but now I have a lot of work to do!

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That’s really impressive! I think you're providing a good example of the work that can be done without field work and also what can happen if you’re persistent.

...it’s all possible with international collaborations.

Yes, and it’s all possible with international collaborations. I’m lucky that the Fulbright Program exists. I don’t know how I would have gotten a spot on this field campaign otherwise, and I hope to keep collaborating with the Chilean scientists that I've met.

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Have your experiences at SCAR conferences like the Open Science Conference in 2018 and the recent Biology Symposium helped you forge connections within the Antarctic research community?

Yeah, both of those meetings were great. The first one was a little overwhelming because the Open Science Conferences are huge. The biology section was just a sliver of all the sessions. It was cool to be able to go to a couple of talks about oceanography or other topics that I don't think about that often. But it was also nice, because, at the one single biology-focused session, I was able to meet all the other polar biologists there. I met several people there who are great connections, who are working on similar systems and similar questions.

The SCAR Biology Symposium in August 2023 was, of course, only biologists. So, that gave me a better idea of the scope of biology that's being done in the SCAR countries. But on the other hand, there were multiple parallel sessions and I couldn’t see everything. Going to those conferences also made me realize that I am doing something pretty different than everybody else. I mean, everyone's work is so cool and so interesting, but mostly focused on ecology. It was clear who the few people doing more physiology directed stuff were, and I spent more time with them.

For example, I met a scientist, Julia Saravia, at the Biology Symposium. She gave a talk, she said that she lives in Chile, and she works on the same fish as I do. Afterwards, I went to talk to her, and I was like my name's Julia, I work on these fish, I'm going to Chile! And now we just spent several weeks together in the Antarctic. Being able to have that connection and collaboration with somebody from the conference has been great.

...being brought together by these conferences has been really important for me so far in my career.

Also, for the next SCAR Open Science Conference in Pucón, I’m helping organize a session with Luis Vargas-Chacoff, who's one of the Chilean scientists here who works on the fish, and Simon Morley, who's at the British Antarctic Survey. We were all here together in Punta Arenas, and Luis and I were in Antarctica together. So, yes, being brought together by these conferences has been really important for me so far in my career.

That’s wonderful. Can you tell me a little bit more about the session that you're co-organizing for the upcoming conference?

The session is called “Antarctic ectotherm resilience: genomic and epigenomic adaptation and physiological capacities/plasticities to cope with climate change.” We kind of went back and forth on it a bit because we wanted to fit a bunch of topics in. I think the important thing is that it will bring together the people that work on fish and the people that work on invertebrates. The session focuses on how animals that are the temperature of their environment deal with that temperature being below the freezing point of their body fluids. It's fish people, but it's also invertebrate people.

Great, it sounds like getting those two groups together will enable more advances, maybe, than if you all stayed in your niche.

Yes, and the invertebrates are really interesting, too. I don't know that much about them, but they do seem to be a lot less tolerant to increases in temperature. There are some fish species that are very intolerant; they start dying at 5°C. There are some other ones that seem to be a little bit more tolerant of higher temperatures, but the invertebrates generally are quite sensitive. They’re also just cool. There’s the phenomenon of gigantism in Antarctic invertebrates – they are huge, like way bigger than the invertebrates that live in warmer waters because of the higher oxygen content. It’s amazing. I’m excited to learn more about invertebrates through that session.

I hope you get a lot out of it! Thinking back to your PhD work on how fish detect temperature, were you interested from a biological perspective and then that led you to Antarctic research? Or were you interested in the Antarctic and it led you to the fish sensors?

Just in my lifetime, the climate has become quite different. This has really driven me to want to study the adaptations of polar organisms to temperature.

That's a very good question. I’m interested in polar animals. I grew up in Alaska and the environment has changed really rapidly over a very short period of time. Just in my lifetime, the climate has become quite different. This has really driven me to want to study the adaptations of polar organisms to temperature. How are they going to adapt to temperature? How are they going to deal with the pace of change that is coming? I think these are really interesting questions in the Arctic because it's changing so rapidly and so intensely. But also, the Arctic is so different from the Antarctic. The Antarctic is so interesting because it's so stable, especially the water temperatures. It presents a whole different question.

So, I think this personal interest is generally how I got into polar organisms. Then, my favorite classes throughout college were always neuroscience classes, particularly ones related to sensory systems. The first time that I learned that, basically, everything is done with ion channels – proteins that are detecting light and detecting touch and detecting heat, and then feeding that information to our brains – and that we share those same proteins with so many different organisms that live different lifestyles and very different habitats, just absolutely blew my mind.

What a nice marriage of your personal interests and scientific interests.

Yeah, it’s been really fun. I feel like there are constantly new questions that pop up for me in terms of different organisms and how diverse they are, and how diverse their strategies are. It's my favorite thing to do, to learn about new things about animals.

It definitely sounds like you chose the right career path! Now I’m curious about your OPP postdoc project on Arctic fish. You mentioned that the Arctic is so different from the Antarctic. Are there any connections between your Antarctic research and this Arctic work?

My Arctic work is essentially the same project, it’s just a different study system. As I explained earlier, I'm comparing fish that have escaped back to temperate waters with Antarctic fish because those fish are adapted to a very narrow range of temperatures. Whereas in the Arctic, there are more species are eurythermic, meaning they are better adapted to a wide range of temperatures versus a narrow range of temperatures. This is because the Arctic Ocean is just not as stable and not as consistently cold. There's a lot more variability. So, that's the study system that I'm looking at for this OPP fellowship work. I’m particularly interested in the polar cod, Boreogadus saida, which is the most stenothermal of the fish that live in the Arctic, meaning it has a narrow range of temperature tolerance and is most similar to the Antarctic fish.

I also want to sequence the genome of that species since it is such an important example of parallel evolution with respect to the two poles. I’m also doing the same kind of sequencing stuff of the temperature sensitive tissue across the polar cod and the other species that are better adapted for warmer temperatures.

So, most of your lab work involves sequencing.

Right now, yes. I'm at the University of Illinois, in Dr. Christina Cheng's lab, as you know. She's a geneticist and evolutionary biologist. She really does all kinds of things, but what drew me to her lab was working on the genetics of the fish. I'm working on generating a lot of good quality sequence data that I then hope to use moving forward in my career. A big aspect of my work is using sequencing to investigate rates of evolution, relationships between the genes, and how they evolved.

I also try to do functional work. One of the things I'm doing here in Chile is learning to do electrophysiology with a new cell system that I haven't used before, and that's specifically to functionally characterize the ion channel. Once you identify a protein, a channel that you think is interesting, you can express it in these systems and you can test temperature sensitivity, or whatever functional thing you're interested in. Originally, for my undergrad and my master's, I was really working on comparative physiology. So, there's part of my heart that’s a comparative physiologist, and I hope someday to also work that into my research and do more classic physiology work in terms of the functionality and the mechanisms that involve the channels.

But right now, I’m focusing on the genetics. I care about the way that fish genomes have evolved and the relationships between the different fish. I find that really interesting as well.

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What interesting and important work. For my last question, what advice would you give to early career scientists who want to get involved in Antarctic research?

I would say, if you're at the beginning of your career, reach out, get involved, show up. As an undergrad, I started working on a project with geese. My job was just cleaning up goose poop and feeding the geese, but I showed up every day and helped where I could. Eventually, you can become more involved in the project, meet everybody else in the lab, and start to help with the experiments. Through that, you can start to develop your own questions and your own projects. I think sometimes when people are new, they want to be really targeted in what they’re doing. But I think starting wherever you can and trying to be helpful there will support development of the skills and the connections you need to achieve your ultimate goal.

That’s great advice! Thank you, Julia.

Post-interview update on SCAR OSC in Pucón:
The session was great. We heard from several people working on different aspects of a specific fish, Harpagifer antarcticus. This fish is found in the intertidal zone and has a close relative, Harpagifer bispinis, that lives off the coast of Punta Arenas, making it a great study system for Antarctic adaptation. This session highlighted how diverse the questions are but also how much we are learning about the same study system. It really mutually benefits everyone to have a wide range of studies on the same animal. We also heard about new research on invertebrates, how they are coping with heat waves, and whether they might be able to acclimate, which will be key for their survival under rapid climate warming. It was a wonderful session and I’m grateful to all the speakers, attendees, and organizers. I met a lot of great scientists there and had some helpful conversations with collaborators. I also learned about the new SCAR action group: SCARFISH, so I am looking forward to participating in that.