Julie is Director of the Poorvu Center’s Teaching Development and Initiatives (TDI) team. The team works with faculty, postdoctoral scholars, and graduate students of all backgrounds and abilities to develop practices that promote equitable and engaged teaching. Julie is particularly interested in rigor and equity. She has given numerous talks with Dr. Jamiella Brooks on the topic, thinking about the ways that the term rigor is often misused or misunderstood due to deficit ideologies. Their works was recently featured in Columbia University’s Dead Ideas podcast. Julie has been at Yale since 2020.
Before Yale, Julie worked for nine years at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Teaching and Learning as an Associate Director, where she also taught several classes. Julie is a Neuroscientist by training, with a B.S. from the University of Pittsburgh and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. As a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania, Julie taught at Rutgers University-Camden through the PennPORT program, a program dedicated to promoting diversity and inclusion in STEM through teaching. Her teaching experience includes online and in-person classes, from large introductory lecture classes to small active learning classes. In 2013, students in the Biological Basis of Behavior Program at Penn honored her with the “Teacher of the Year” award.
Outside of work, Julie enjoys traveling with her family, listening to live music, and gardening, with a particular interest in native plants.