Julie Theriot attended college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning dual B. S. degrees in physics and biology. She completed her Ph.D. in cell biology at the University of California at San Francisco, and then returned to Cambridge as a Whitehead Fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. She joined the faculty of the Stanford University School of Medicine in 1997, with appointments in the Department of Biochemistry and the Department of Microbiology & Immunology, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). Julie is currently a Professor at the University of Washington, Department of Biology, a continuing HHMI Investigator, and as Chief Scientist at the Allen Institute for Cell Science.

The experimental work of her research group focuses on quantitative measurement of the dynamic and mechanical behavior of structural components in living cells, exploring the molecular and biophysical mechanisms of various forms of cell motility and shape determination across a variety of eukaryotic and bacterial cell types. Julie has won numerous awards for her research, including the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship for Science and Engineering and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. She has also received multiple teaching awards from both M. D. and Ph. D. students at Stanford. Julie is a coauthor of the textbook “Physical Biology of the Cell.”