As the Director, Innovation Startups at WWF, Julia works to identify and research emerging issues, trends, and tools with potential to disrupt food and agriculture systems for environmental sustainability and financial growth. This includes launching multi-stakeholder platforms, designing and piloting new business strategies and models, and facilitating their adoption. In her career, Julia has founded her own urban, soilless farming system and advised numerous young and growing companies on business strategy and growth plans.

Before that, Julia spent four years in the research world at Hart Research Associates and then as the Director of Research and Policy at the National Women’s Business Council where she created a new research vision to re-energize a defunct organization and partnered with the private sector to create a policy agenda focused on meeting the needs of small businesses. Prior to her time in the research world, Julia spent nearly two years on the first Obama campaign traveling across the country building large constituent and volunteer coalitions in communities as diverse as inner-city Philadelphia to rural South Carolina.

For the past two years, Julia has worked as an adjunct professor at Rutgers Business School where she designed and now teaches in the Social Entrepreneurship program. Julia holds an SB from MIT, an MBA in entrepreneurial management from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and an MPA focused on sustainability from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.