Julie began her professional life as a polar scientist, completing both a Masters, and PhD degrees in Geology at The Ohio State University. As the Program Director for Antarctic Glaciology, in the Division of Polar Programs, at the National Science Foundation (NSF), she managed most of the glaciological research at colleges and universities of the Antarctic ice sheet. Her program was instrumental in developing the US expertise in ice core science, including the support to the drilling operations and laboratory-based techniques needed to analyze the ice cores drilled in the polar regions. Ice cores are now widely used as a proxy for past climate and for helping to predict what might happen in the future. Julie retired from NSF at the end of 2016 and began her “Encore Career” in animal welfare. She completed a Post-Graduate Certificate in International Animal Welfare Ethics and Law (IAWEL) from the University of Edinburgh (2017) and a Master of Science (MS) in Anthrozoology (2019) at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. Julie was among the first cohort of students to complete the new Master of Studies in Animal Law (MSL) Program in the Center for Animal Law Studies (CALS) and graduated with honors. Julie was also selected as one of the 2024-2025 CALS GAP program ambassadors.
Julie’s interests in animal law extend to many different areas of the field, to many different categories of animals and across the continents. In 2019, while completing her master’s degree in Anthrozoology, she interned at the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) in Washington, D.C. and studied the available data from the FBI on animal cruelty and the link to human violence. The publications from her work on the NIBRS (National incident-Based Reporting System) data (4 magazine articles and a peer-reviewed journal article) are available upon request. Beginning in 2019, Julie started visiting Nepal as a tourist and developed an interest in the free-roaming dogs that exist throughout Nepal. Julie returned to Nepal once or twice a year to learn as much as she could about the animal welfare issues that existed in the country. Julie is also the author of two bilingual children’s books (in English and Nepali), both based on true stories. The first was about an abused street dog entitled Sathi The Street Dog from Kathmandu, Nepal and the second was just released in the Fall of 2024 and is called Sahara The Rescue Dog from Bhaktapur, Nepal.
As part of her animal law course work, Julie developed an initiative to bring the field of animal law into Nepalese law schools called SAVE Nepal. The acronym SAVE stands for Save Animals and Value the Environment. She created two websites while at CALS, one that provides resources and information about free-roaming “street dogs” and the other for the SAVE Nepal initiative. In addition to the problems associated with the street dogs in Nepal, Julie has an interest in topics related to human-wildlife conflict, the welfare of working equids (horses and donkeys) and the future of animal agriculture in Nepal.
In addition to her work in Nepal, Julie is also interested in a variety of domestic and international animal law issues. She wants to become more involved in advocating for the welfare of the wild horses and burros on public lands in the U.S., and she is interested in working in the area of sustainable development and the initiatives underway to eliminate animal exploitation in the global food system. Finally, Julie is interested in getting involved in future work to make the proposed Convention on Animal Protection for Public Health, Animal Well-Being, and the Environment (CAP) a reality.