Jill Trewhella grew up in Australia. After getting her PhD, she spent 25 years in America before returning to University of Sydney in 2005. Although a researcher at heart, Jill has been involved in many pioneering and large-scale efforts in the scientific arena, including serving as the Los Alamos National Lab bioterrorism spokesperson during the 2001 anthrax-laced letter attacks in the US. After being recruited back to Australia, Jill continued her biophysical research and eventually took on the role of Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research with responsibility for growing the University of Sydney’s research position within Australia and internationally. She is an extraordinary person with huge amounts of energy for both small and big issues.

Jill Trewhella was born 1953 and raised in the small town of Gosford, Australia. Her father was a telecommunications technician and inventor while her mother managed the home, was a superb cook, and used her keen fashion sense and creative skills to outfit family and friends. Both parents influenced Jill: her father gave her a love for technical things and her mother taught her appreciation for precision. Although the plan was to become a math teacher, she switched to physics after the head of the physics school realized her potential and offered to place her in the honors physics program. After earning her bachelor’s degree in math and physics in 1974, which was also the year she got married, she continued with small-molecule crystallography and obtained a master’s degree. In 1976 her son was born and Jill returned to Gosford to take care of the baby while her husband was pursuing his PhD at University of Sydney. After 2 years, her husband was fatigued by long commutes and wanted to move the family to Sydney. Since Jill did not want to be isolated in an apartment, she decided to go back to school and finish her own PhD at University of Sydney, which had a daycare on campus. There she met the young professor Peter Wright and became his first PhD student. Peter was a great advisor and gave her confidence to continue with postdoctoral studies after she earned her PhD in 1980.

Jill’s husband wanted to go to America. When he was offered a post-doctoral position at Yale University, Jill wrote and asked for a position for herself there, and got one. The couple moved together but, after one year they divorced, and Jill had to find her own way with her young son for eight years, until she remarried.

In 1984, she joined Los Alamos National Laboratory with the task of launching a biological neutron scattering program. She did this and much more - most notably, she realized her vision of a multidisciplinary bioscience division with much persistence, and she became its first head in 1999. At Los Alamos, Jill also met her current husband who she married in 1991. Because Jill was the Los Alamos spokesperson on all matters related to bioterrorism, she was in the hot seat during the anthrax attacks through the US mail after September 11, 2001. She became the calm voice of science and she even personally advised President Bush on technology available for detection of bio-threat agents. In 2004, Jill and her husband moved to her husband’s home state of Utah where she got a position in the Vice President’s Office at University of Utah. Immediately she was successful in helping to establish a prestigious National Institutes of Health Research Center of Excellence at the university. Even after this success, the next year, 2005, she took a big step and returned to Australia as an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow and joined the school of Molecular Bioscience at the University of Sydney. This was a very prestigious fellowship and importantly, as the only daughter, it placed her close to her aging mother while allowing her to do the science she really loved.

Jill quickly set up a large research group at University of Sydney. Many things had changed since she had left the university and Australia 25 years earlier, but her crystallographer colleague from her graduate study days, Mitchell Guss, was still there and they enjoyed a close and inspiring collaboration. In 2009, Jill was offered the position of Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research, which she accepted, one of the roles being to oversee the development of collaborative and cross-disciplinary research programs. Under Jill’s leadership, the Charles Perkins Center was established – which was a huge $365 million construction project with an ongoing research and education program aimed at addressing the problems arising from the increasing incidences of obesity.

Jill was one of the pioneers in using neutron scattering for membrane protein structures and since her early studies she has continued with numerous structural projects using X-ray and neutron scattering methods on proteins regulated by second messengers such as calcium and cyclic nucleotides to better understand enzyme regulation networks in cells. Despite her many leadership roles, Jill always kept her research going in parallel, something that was possible because she has not lost her hands-on experimental and technical skills. Throughout the years, Jill has been very active serving the Biophysical Society: she has been secretary, on the executive board and council, chair of publications committee, on the editorial board of Biophysical Journal as well as on many other committees. In fact, the senior women in the Biophysical Society in the 1980s and 90s were very supportive of her career, and seeing so many successful academic women in leadership roles made Jill think it was a rather normal thing although in reality, it was unusual.

Jill is now an emeritus professor in Sydney, which gives her more time to focus on her own research again as well as things outside the lab. Jill was trained in classical piano as a child, she loves music, and she likes to write science fiction. She now spends half her time in Sydney and half in Utah (with labs in both places still up and running) and on her free time she likes downhill skiing (in Utah), ocean swimming (in Sydney), making tapestries with Australian themes, and much more. In the near future however, she will be very busy: she will volunteer as a full-time nanny together with her husband as they soon will become grandparents. With their help, their daughter-in-law will be able to go back to work.

The most rewarding aspect of doing research, Jill says, is the ability to be self-directed, to experience diverse cultures and see the world, and to enjoy the feeling of discovering something entirely new that no one knew before you figured it out. Jill’s advice to young scientists is that the best way to be successful is to do the things you love. She also emphasizes that “the possibilities are limitless.”