Julia Hiser: Paving the future of medicine through research

Julia Hiser is a research scientist for a local Charlottesville biotech startup, Contraline. Contraline is building a highly effective, non-hormonal, and reversible form of male contraception.

Julia knew that she wanted to be a biomedical engineer since she was in middle school but had no idea how she would apply her knowledge. By becoming an active member in building the local biotech community, she became close with the COO of Contraline and was offered a job that allowed her tocontinue doing what she loves, working in a lab and making new discoveries. Here’s her story.

Andy Page: Julia! Go ahead and introduce yourself.

Julia Hiser: I’m Julia Hiser, I recently graduated from the University of Virginia as a biomedical engineer and have lived in Virginia my whole life. I work as a research scientist at a local biotech startup, Contraline. I also do some research on the side in an infectious disease lab at UVA.

AP: Tell me your story. What got you to where you are today?

Julia: I’m the youngest of three and everyone in my family is an engineer. Growing up it was the expectation that you would be an engineer one day. But being the last child by many years, I wanted to break out and be different. I wanted to pursue music and cultivate a more creative side.

Throughout my life, a love of music has never really taken a back seat, but back when my older sister was doing her first college tour of UVA, I heard about biomedical engineering and I specifically remember thinking “Whoa! That exists? That sounds like the coolest thing ever. I’m going to do that.”

So when I was twelve, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. It sounds absurd but I can point back to that day I first heard about biomedical engineering in my journal from 2007. I wrote that biomedical engineering was really cool and that that’s what I wanted to study one day.

Ever since I started school at UVA and then got to know Charlottesville better, this city has felt like home. When I was in high school and I would visit my sister here, I would always say something along the lines of “ I want to be here one day.” Even back then I loved it! There’s just some kind of intangible sense of energy about this place, it’s a very romantic thing.

AP: So tell me a little bit more about Contraline and the research you do at UVA.

Julia: Contraline is a startup that spun out of research at UVA and we’re developing a new form of male contraception. Its an injectable hydrogel that goes into the vas deferens and occludes the flow of sperm but allows the flow of everything else. It’s nonhormonal, reversible, and long-lasting. When we get it to work, it’s going to be a great alternative to vasectomy and also put more birth control responsibility on the man.

I usually say it’s kinda like a male IUD.

I never expected to work at Contraline. Ever. When I got to UVA, I started to hear about this cool company that was getting started and was like “Oh that’s awesome — they’re taking ideas from university research and finding ways to commercialize them and create a company that’s working on the first product.” But I never expected of working in this specific application area of medical research.

Through meeting people in the local biotech industry in Charlottesville, I got connected to Nikki Hastings who has started a company in Charlottesville called Hemoshear which is doing really well. We started working together on a community organization called Cville Biohub and then she jumped onto the Contraline team as the Chief Operations Officer.

During my 4th year I told her that I was looking to stay in Charlottesville and work before going to grad school and she said to keep Contraline in mind.

When it comes to research, I love the wet lab and working with the cells — the really nitty gritty stuff and that’s what Contraline was looking for, so it was a great match!

AP: And your research at UVA?

Julia: It’s very different! I’m studying antibiotic resistance and more specifically a subpopulation of bacteria called persister cells. Basically, when you hit a culture of bacteria with a high concentration of antibiotics, it theoretically kills 99%. That 1% remaining is the subpopulation that is allowed to persist and can tolerate that treatment. Overtime those populations develop genetic mutations, which enable populations to resist treatment with antibiotics.

For a few years now I’ve been working in the Papin Lab, which is creating genome-scale metabolic network models: computational frameworks that can look at the entire metabolism of an organism and tell how well a microbe will survive based on certain environmental perturbations. That way, we can start to tease out what is going on in these presister metabolic states.

It’s a really cool project! There was definitely a bit of a learning curve because there’s a lot of high-throughput computation involved, but so far it’s been a really rewarding experience.

AP: Why biomedical engineering? What about it keeps you going?

Julia: My dad got really sick while I was in elementary school and so I spent pretty much that whole four months in the hospital with him. In a really strange kind of way, I really enjoyed the hospital environment. There was just so much that fascinated me about the health system

At that same time, I was also taking my first life science class and we were just starting to talk about nucleic acids, proteins, and all of the building blocks of life. I just thought it was so cool.

Then I started getting into studies like chemistry and biology and all these things just kind of came together. I started to see that these studies weren’t just single disciplines but they were all connected. I didn’t just want to go down the physics path, the chemistry path, or the computer science path.

Biomedical engineering combined all of these things in a lot of different ways.

It also has the ability to really change and really improve people while at the same time, if we aren’t careful really harm the way that people live.

In the end, there’s awesome potential in the solutions that can be found and I want to be a part of that.

AP: What is this something you wish more people knew about the work that you did.

Julia: I wish that people realized how accessible these concepts really are. A lot of times when people ask me about what I do and I say I’m a biomedical engineer working for a biotech startup, I can see that they immediately check out. I think I could interpret that as an ego-trip, that I’m doing this thing that they don’t know about but that’s dumb and honestly not true. I don’t think that the things that I do are hard. I think there’s a lot of jargon to get around and lot of stigma around the study being “hard”. It’s the same way that a lot of people are apprehensive about coding. It’s not that coding is inherently harder than other studies, people just think that it is and find it difficult to start.

These “hard” studies aren’t really far off from them intellectually or conceptually. It’s just a matter of making connections to things that you already know.

AP: What is your least favorite thing about what you do?

Julia: Being inside, definitely. My first two summers of college, I worked as a camp counselor, and literally lived outside. With biotech, you’re pretty much in white labs with no windows all day. You can’t do cell culture outside, that’s not sterile.

AP: Knowing what you know now. What advice would you give to someone who was in your similar position four years ago?

Julia: When you’re thinking about going into college. Don’t worry about your performance, don’t worry about what everyone else is doing, or how your grades stack up in anyway. This is going to sound stupid and clique but find out what your questions are about the world. Because exploring those questions is where you’re going to find what you really like to do.

I hated studying engineering during my first year. After my first semester, I was trying to transfer to a music school in Nashville because it wasn’t what I was expecting.

If you’re always thinking about how you stack up to others, it’s always going to be about you, it’s not about the world. You’re not thinking about how your gifts, talents, abilities, and opportunities intersect to make the world better.

Start looking for what interests you — even if you’re not as good at it as you would like to be.

AP: Alright, now for some quick Charlottesville questions. Favorite restaurant?

Julia: Oh — that’s so hard. It’s changing for me depending on the day right now but I will say my favorite Charlottesville restaurant find is Barbies Burrito Barn. It’s a tiny house, right around the corner from Champion brewery. It has an open concept kitchen when you walk in and there’s this woman, Barbie who is making the food.

The menu is really simple, everything is really cheap, and everything I’ve had there so far has been amazing.

AP: Favorite hangout spot?

Julia: I’d say while I was in undergrad, Grit Coffee on Elliewood Ave. Now, after having graduating, definitely Common House. Especially during the summer, nothing beats a nice evening on the rooftop here.

AP: Favorite outdoor activity?

Julia: In the city, definitely biking. Out of the city, kayaking!