BIO
Julie Jung is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow based at the University of Utah studying developmental plasticity in extremophile Diplogastrid nematodes. As a postdoc in biology, Julie spends a lot of her time pushing around small volumes of liquid and sterilizing stuff. But studying plasticity in several systems gives her a chance to do something new pretty much every day, like grow plants or trap small mammals, take pretty pictures of snakes, kayak around the Great Salt Lake collecting worms, or extract RNA with a fancy immersion blender.
Julie spent her Ph.D. conducting fieldwork (read: chasing frogs) at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Gamboa, Panama where she examined vibration-cued early hatching behavior (plasticity!) in red-eyed treefrogs. Working outdoors in sweaty, soggy, buggy, humid, normally deplorable conditions makes her really happy. Whenever she's not sciencing, Julie can be found doing typical Utah things like ski mountaineering, ice climbing, or rock scrambling.
Julie got her B.A. from Williams College in 2015 and her dual M.A./Ph.D. from Boston University in 2021. She is basically in the 23rd (24th?) grade, but she’s sort of losing count at this point. She's a 1st generation college graduate and a 1st generation US citizen. She credits everything good in her life to her loving parents, who rededicated and rearranged their entire lives to facilitate the success of their children.
