Kailey Soller ’11 receives 4 Under 40 Alumni Achievement Award 

When Kailey Soller ’11 was a young child, her cousin was diagnosed with a devastatingly rare disease. “There was so little research on the disease at that time, and I remember thinking, ‘OK, I want to help. I want to contribute in making an impact in patients’ lives,’” Soller says. Now, many years later, that desire combined with her curiosity about how and why things work has made Soller a scientist following God’s call and making huge strides in healthcare diagnostics for patients and their families.“We’ve been commanded as Christians to help others and find ways to try to improve each other's lives,” she says. 

As senior strategy, innovation, and business development manager at Beckman Coulter Diagnostics in Chaska, Minnesota, Soller is able to combine her innate aptitude for deciphering scientific data and her compassion for others. “I love to be at the bench doing the actual lab work, designing experiments, and analyzing the data,” she says. “But I also want to know more about the business as a whole. Why does it operate the way that it does? Why are we doing this? Who are the patients that we’re serving? And how are we helping them?”

She and the Beckman Coulter team recently launched a new version of an instrument that tests blood. “If you’ve ever had your blood drawn and then shipped to the lab—we’re the ones who create the instrumentation that runs that blood to check hormone levels and reagents and assays,” Soller says. “Our new version is much more sensitive and precise.” And for patients, this means clear results the first time around. Seeing that come to fruition—bringing a new, successful platform to a market that’s regulated by the FDA—has taken many years, but Soller says it’s been fulfilling.

Now she’s working on a project in the neurodegenerative disease space, looking at diagnostics for Alzheimer’s disease. “It’s a new and emerging field, and it’s a little unclear where it’s all going to go, but we want to get the diagnostics out there to help patients get diagnosed early,” she says. “Then they can maybe start treatment earlier, slow down the progression of the disease, and give families more time for planning. It’s such a personal disease that affects so many people, so it’s really rewarding to be a part of this.”

Starting at Bethel

By the time Soller arrived at Bethel as an undergraduate, she knew she wanted to go into science, and she knew she didn’t want to be a doctor. Beyond that, she wasn’t sure. She jumped into life on campus: tutoring in the science department, participating in a small group on her freshman floor, becoming a Shift leader, and spending hours in the lab. “Dr. Neibergall and I would work in the lab together side by side, or he’d be teaching me in his office for hours about how to read a DNA sequence and how to understand it and what that meant,” Soller says. “It was just a very personal kind of one-on-one mentoring and investment in me as I was getting started in my scientific career.” 

Then, she got to present at a conference with her professors and found she really liked the more in-depth level of research. “It was a turning point for me—just seeing the scientific research presented in that way within a large scientific community,” she says.

She began to consider grad school at the encouragement of some of her professors, but she wanted to try out the industry first without a Ph.D.

After graduating from Bethel in 2011 with a B.A. chemistry and a B.S. in biochemistry and molecular biology, Soller secured a full-time position at R&D Systems—where she had been interning—in their research labs. After a year, she enrolled at the University of Minnesota, where she studied protein-protein interactions involved in heart failure and heart function. “I felt like the research I did at Bethel prepared me really well for my graduate program,” she says. “I was equipped to handle the disappointments that come with experimenting. You need the mindset of a scientist: no data is bad data. It's just telling you what doesn't work and that you have to look in a different direction.”

After graduate school, Soller landed at Beckman Coulter and returned to Bethel as an adjunct professor for two years. “I loved it. I really liked the mentorship side of teaching and interacting with students,” she says. And she was able to share her scientific career path with students interested in science but maybe not medicine. “It was always surprising to people when I would say that I didn’t want to become a doctor, or I didn't want to be in medicine as a scientist,” Soller says. “So, I wanted to engage with students who felt the same way that I did, and show them all these other paths that they could take within science and even within the healthcare field, but not necessarily confined to direct patient care.”

Outside of work

In addition to her role at Beckman Coulter, Soller is on the board of directors for the Minnesota Academy of Science (MAS). The nonprofit focuses on STEM education for K-12 students and hosts an annual state science and engineering fair for which Soller serves as a judge. Additionally, MAS works to attract more students—particularly those in underserved communities—into STEM. “We focus on bringing programming to them that’s really accessible and meets them where they are,” says Soller. “We try to showcase STEM in a way that’s fun and current—not just a very boring recipe experiment.” This includes community play days and events at local libraries where the whole family can get involved. “We’re engaging with people in a way that they can understand, and it’s not threatening,” says Soller. “It’s just trying to improve scientific literacy and engagement for everyone and trying to build up those younger students, too.”

And Soller holds two other important roles: wife and mom. Soller and her husband, Ryan Soller ’11, met their freshman year at Bethel and have been married 12 years; they have two girls. Together, they love Minnesota and enjoy hiking and traveling. 

Soller plans to continue finding ways to improve patients’ lives and along the way hopes to encourage others who feel a similar calling. To those interested in science, Soller says not to get hung up on the oft-assumed dissonance between science and Christianity. “Both scientists and Christians feel like sometimes science and Christianity don’t necessarily go well together. But I see it as the opposite,” Soller says. “Science is God’s way of allowing us to explore and understand His creation deeply. There are so many precise things in science that you’re like, ‘how could this possibly be without God having a hand in this?’ They’re really just intricately and beautifully tied together.”

Nominate the next 4 Under 40 recipients!

Bethel University’s National Alumni Board annually seeks and accepts nominations for the 4 Under 40 Alumni Achievement Award. The selection is made from Bethel University graduates 40 years of age or younger who have had outstanding achievements in their career, public service, or volunteer activities.

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