Julia Przykładowa

The first thing you notice in Julia Przykładowa lab at the University of Warmia and Mazury is the sound. Forty-seven jars, each with its own culture, each quietly at work, a low, bubbling percussion she calls “the choir”. The second thing you notice is the postcard taped to the fridge: a hand-drawn starburst, nine rays, sent from Valencia by a lab partner she has met in person exactly three times.

That fridge, she says, is the alliance in miniature: nine shelves, nine temperatures, one experiment. Sokołowska graduated from UWM in 2018, spent exchange semesters in Offenburg and Valencia, and was inducted into the ChallengeEU Alumni Hall of Fame this spring — the first food scientist on the list.

Nine campuses, one fridge

Her doctoral work on cold-climate fermentation started as a footnote in somebody else’s project. During a ChallengeEU summer school in Jelgava, an agronomist from LBTU handed her a sample of overwintered rye and a challenge: make this interesting. Four years later the “interesting” is a patented starter culture, a spin-off, and a TEDx talk with two million views.

• The starter culture is developed between two labs — Olsztyn and Valencia — 1,800 km apart.
• The spin-off’s first hire came through the alumni directory, not a job board.
• The TEDx invitation arrived from a MIUN graduate who had seen her pitch at Alliance Days.

The patience you can taste

Ask her what the Alumni Network actually does and she reaches for the jars. “Nothing, for months. Then everything at once.” The mentoring circle she joined as a mentee in 2019 is the one she now chairs; the student she advises in Tetovo sends her sensory panels by post. The alliance, she argues, is not a place — it is a temperature: the conditions under which slow things become inevitable.

The failure chapter is her favourite. The first culture died in transit to Valencia — customs, heat, three weeks in a warehouse. The second died in Olsztyn, out of spite, she suspects. The third travelled as hand luggage in a colleague’s backpack through four countries. “That backpack is the real European infrastructure,” she laughs.

Three questions before lunch

The choir bubbles on. Somewhere between the fourth and fifth shelf, between Olsztyn and Valencia, between the class of 2018 and the class of 2036 — the experiment continues. Once ChallengeEU, always ChallengeEU.