Julie Theriot, Ph.D.

Julie Theriot is the Benjamin D. Hall Endowed Chair in Basic Life Sciences and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. Her lab explores the mechanics and dynamics of how cells organize themselves to create their own structures and shapes. She studies an unusually wide variety of cell types and model systems in order to gain a broad conceptual understanding of the organizational rules that give rise to cell structure and coordinated movement. This work has important implications for understanding host-pathogen interactions, the function of immune cells, and the basic biology of all cells from bacteria to humans. Her work is highly interdisciplinary in nature, bridging cell biology, microbiology, genetics, chemistry, and biophysics.

Theriot has won numerous awards for her research, including the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship for Science and Engineering and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. She is passionate about science education, has won multiple teaching awards, and is coauthor of the textbook, Physical Biology of the Cell.