Julie is a senior majoring in food science and a James Scholar honor student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She previously worked in Dr. Melissa Prescott’s lab during her sophomore year, focusing on food security for the campus pantry, and was acknowledged in the publication titled “The Role of Campus Food Pantries in the Food Security Safety Net: Ongoing or Emergency Use at a Midwest Campus Pantry.” She then joined Dr. Yi Cheng Wang’s lab during her junior year and worked on applying nonthermal processing, using cold plasma on blueberries, as well as synthesizing silver and gold nanoparticles for intelligent packaging. During the summer of 2023, she conducted research at Cornell University as a Summer Scholar in Dr. Carmen Moraru’s lab, where her focus was on fabricating nanoporous anodic aluminum oxide (AAO) to inhibit microbial attachment on surfaces.

She recently joined the Stasiewicz lab and was accepted into the ACES Undergraduate Global Food Security Internship program, where she is concentrating on analyzing maize from Kenya at the single kernel level to test mycotoxin levels and examine the microbial community on kernels through sequencing.

In her free time, she enjoys skiing, ice skating, Pilates, and swimming.