Julia is British Academy Global Professor, with a four-year award for research on changing patterns of drug supply, and the impact of decriminalisation and legalisation initiatives on the quality of drug policy making, stakeholder inclusion and reduction of drug related harms. Her research, teaching and supervision interests focus on illicit drug markets and the impact of counter narcotics policies on development, gender equality and security. She has experience of applied and practice focused research in intersecting areas of policy design and evaluation, including conflict, rights based and gender sensitive processes. She has geographical expertise on Latin America and is a specialist on Venezuela.

Julia was previously Professor of Comparative Politics, Associate Dean and Acting Dean at the School of Public Policy, Central European University in Budapest and has held research, teaching and / or management positions in Peace Studies at the University of Bradford, Georgetown University (School of Foreign Service) and Kingston University. She led a three-year project with Fatima Jinnah Women University, Rawalpindi on peace and conflict capacity building for female parliamentarians, academics and researchers; she led the UK Foreign Office Chevening course 'Using Democracy for Peace'; and she was part of academic teams that designed and delivered the Chevening course ‘Security Sector Reform in Countries Emerging from Conflict’ and various donor and consultancy projects on peacebuilding, conflict reduction, combatant demobilisation and security sector reform including for Swedish SIDA, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Finland, USAID and the UK Department for International Development. At Central European University, Julia managed a series of awards from Open Society Foundations Global Drug Policy Programme that enabled research and international workshops on drug policy analysis and the gendered impacts of drug policy enforcement, and delivery of an annual drug policy reform summer school.