Welcoming Julia Wilcots
Written by Kaleigh Swift
Julia Wilcots has always been drawn to puzzles. The kind of puzzles written across the Earth’s surface and buried in its ancient layers. Now, she is dedicating her career to deciphering why our planet looked the way it did hundreds of millions of years ago and what has caused it to change so dramatically over time. Her work attempts to explain some of the Earth’s strangest historical environments, and may even offer new insights into the rapid shifts the world is experiencing today.
Growing up in Madison, Wisconsin, a true college town, Julia was surrounded by academic life. Her father, a professor of astronomy, was who first introduced her to the excitement of academia. “From a young age, I just thought his life was very cool,” she recalls. “I liked his department, I thought his graduate students were so interesting, and I thought that university life was very attractive.” At the same time, another influence was inspiring her future dreams. Her grandfather had been an architect, and Julia inherited both his love of design and her own eye for structure. While she admired her father’s chosen career path, she initially pictured herself following in her grandfather’s footsteps, building houses or bridges. So, when Julia arrived at Princeton as an undergraduate, her plan was clear. She would become an architect. She planned to major in architectural engineering, a field that combined her love of design with her skill in mathematics.
During her first semester at Princeton University, Julia enrolled in a freshman seminar called Earth’s Environments and Ancient Civilizations. Though it was billed as a course on how societies adapted to climate change, it turned out to be, in her words, “an intense geology, earth science, geophysics class.” The difficulty of the course sparked a new fascination. Just six weeks into college, she found herself on a field trip to Cyprus, where the class studied deposits left behind when the Mediterranean Sea dried up millions of years ago. Julia remembers the moment vividly: “We found these two-and-a-half-meter-long gypsum crystals, these perfect V-shaped crystals. I thought that was awesome. So that kind of got me hooked.” Though this experience was life changing, it would take some time for those changes to come to fruition.
Julia stuck with her plan to become an engineer. She spent the majority of her undergrad years studying bridges, even getting the opportunity to travel to Denmark for her work. She would graduate cum laude with a degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering. However, by the start of her senior year, she realized she no longer wanted to continue on that career trajectory. Her passion for intellectual puzzles was drawing her back towards the types of geological questions first posed to her in that freshman seminar. She decided that she would change directions as she continued in academia to better align with her interests. Though she would graduate with an engineering degree, her senior year became a sprint to take the courses she would need to be accepted into an earth and environmental sciences related graduate program.
After taking a gap year, she applied and was accepted into a Ph.D. program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology working with Dr. Kristin Bergmann. She was involved in several projects that saw her traveling to the corners of the globe to places like Svalbarg and Western Australia. The connection between each of these projects: the Neoproterozoic era and Dolomite. The Neoproterozoic was marked by global glaciations and strange chemical signatures in the rock record. What draws Julia to this era is the combination of mystery and clarity. Fossils are scarce, which means she studies Earth less as a landscape filled with life and more as a planet in transition. “Something happened, you know it happened because it is in the rocks. But you do not know what happened or how it happened or why. You have to put all the pieces back together, and I think that is very intellectually rewarding.”
Dolomite, a calcium-magnesium carbonate that appears abundantly in ancient rocks from the Neoproterozoic but rarely forms today. Geologists call this phenomenon “the Dolomite problem.” Julia was so intrigued that this problem became the topic of her thesis. She explains, “why is the rock record made of dolomite? There’s none of it today. What’s up with all the magnesium? It’s actually a really hard mineral to precipitate. It requires very weird conditions, which barely happen now. Maybe they happened a lot in the past. Maybe not.” To Julia, the challenge of this work was not discouraging but exhilarating.
Once she completed her doctorate, Julia moved to Princeton for her postdoctoral work joining the lab of Adam Maloof, a scientist she had known since her undergraduate years. Maloof, she explains, is relentless in his questioning and precision. “He makes me a better scientist so I was excited to work with him,” Julia says. In his lab, she gained access to a remarkable instrument known as the Grinding and Imaging Reconstruction system. This device allows researchers to shave away thin slices of rock, taking high resolution images at each layer. Over time, these images can be combined to reconstruct the rock in three dimensions. Rocks like dolomite that once looked uniform were revealed to have subtle textures and patterns that were easier to describe numerically than visually. The work was slow, as imaging always is, but deeply rewarding. Thousands of images built a digital library of specimens. Julia saw the potential to shift geology from descriptions in words to visual data that could be measured, compared, and analyzed, and a method that could eventually be utilized by labs all over the world.
Looking ahead, as Julia transitions into her role at the University of Minnesota she is eager to continue some research projects and methods, while expanding into new territory. Much of her past research has focused on deciphering what the rocks are already telling us, but she now wants to create controlled experiments that can recreate some of those ancient conditions. She is especially interested in stromatolites, layered structures built by microbes that dominated the oceans before animals appeared. “Can I make some of these weird rocks in this controlled environment and figure out the environmental conditions they formed under?” These experiments will take place in collaboration with colleagues at the Saint Anthony Falls Laboratory, where water flow and sediment can be carefully manipulated. By simulating the chemistry, depth, and movement of ancient seas, Julia hopes to understand how ancient rock forms came to be. She also plans to test whether she and her collaborators can grow stromatolites under modern laboratory conditions, offering a window into the environments that shaped early life.
Julia is also turning her attention closer to her new home. “We are sitting on carbonates,” she notes. “It seems like it would be a waste not to think about the carbonates you can drive to in ten minutes, rather than the ones you have to fly across the world to go see.” The Paleozoic rocks of Minnesota may not hold the same dramatic climate swings as the Neoproterozoic, but Julia believes they could reveal what it means for a planet to remain in a period of stability. Times of stasis, she points out, are rarely studied, yet they may hold vital clues to Earth’s resilience.
As Julia begins building her own research group, she is being intentional about the kind of team she hopes to assemble. She knows her strengths lie in fieldwork and computation, and she is candid about the areas where she wants others to bring expertise. She is looking for students and collaborators who are excited to experiment, to test and adjust, and to try hands-on approaches. “I think that would be super exciting for a student, especially one who likes tinkering.” For Julia, the ideal lab is a place where different strengths complement one another. Julia wants her lab to be a place where people feel encouraged to ask ambitious questions and to explore new approaches. She recognizes that the work can be slow, the data massive, and the puzzles difficult, but she also knows that the most rewarding discoveries come from teams that bring diverse perspectives to a shared problem.
For all the excitement in her work, Julia is realistic about the hurdles ahead. One challenge is the sheer scale of the data she is collecting from the technique of building 3D images. Where past geologists once sketched cliffs in colored rectangles, Julia and her colleagues generate terabytes of high resolution images for a single section of rock. “We skipped an intermediate step, maybe, and now it is almost too much data,” she explains. Each image contains millions of pixels, and the task of deciding which measurements matter most is still evolving, and is very likely project specific.
Another challenge is persuading the broader geology community to value the methods she utilizes. For generations, geologists have described rocks in words, building a specialized vocabulary for features seen in the field. The technique Julia deploys replaces that vocabulary with images and numbers. “Getting people on board with this idea that you can describe a rock in numbers and not in words is kind of tough in the geology crowd,” she says. Yet she sees the merit, not only because it offers greater precision but also because it creates digital archives that anyone can access and study.
Julia Wilcots’s career is still in its early chapters though she has already carved out a place as a scientist willing to take on Earth’s deepest puzzles. From her first glimpse of crystals in Cyprus to her work on the enigmatic dolomite problem, she has sought answers to questions that are not limited to what ancient environments looked like, but to why they changed, and what those changes mean for a planet that is again in transition. “Things are changing today very quickly, much quicker than they have ever changed before,” she reflects. By connecting the distant past to the urgent questions of the present, Julia’s research reminds us that the history of the Earth is a guide to resilience, adaptation, and the forces that have shaped life itself.