Julia Sheldon
(She/Her)
Science teacher
Julia spent her childhood in Boulder, Colorado, where she could usually be found searching for geodes, damming up creeks, or playing with prisms. Her fascination with the natural world led her to love science and eventually to pursue a degree in chemistry at the University of California at San Diego.
At UCSD, she explored the effects of climate change by studying fish physiology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She also discovered a passion for teaching through serving as a teaching assistant and mentoring students in the Ronald McNair program. Julia continued her research and teaching at Yale University, where she earned a PhD in bio-organic chemistry while studying the interactions between DNA and the proteins that begin the transcription process.
After graduate school, Julia began teaching at The Ethel Walker School in Simsbury, Connecticut. She has served as Science Department Chair, Dean of Faculty, and Dean of Academics at Walker’s. As an educator at an all-girls school, she is passionate about engaging girls in the STEMM fields by encouraging them to observe the environment around them and to explore how science can help them understand and improve their world.
A highlight of her career was being named a National Geographic Grosvenor Teacher Fellow and traveling on an expedition to Svalbard. Her experience as a Fellow led her to find new ways to teach geo-literacy, and she has since learned from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, and the Hartford Audubon Society. She has also co-developed a course where girls search for novel antibiotics in their local environment to combat the antibiotic resistance crisis.
Most recently, Julia was honored to travel to the Galapagos as an alumna of the Grosvenor Teacher Fellow program and she is now teaching an elective course on climate change.
