Julia has a PhD in international politics from Aberystwyth University, a master in Environmental Governance from the University of Pavia (European School for Advanced Studies) and a MSc in Economic and Social Science from Bocconi University.

Before moving to UNNC, Julia was a Post-Doctoral Researcher and a Senior Research Fellow at the Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, where she worked on projects on geopolitics of energy, energy governance and energy transitions. She taught at Aberystwyth and at Oxford Brookes.  Before studying for her PhD she collaborated with ISPI and Bocconi University and published on environmental and security issues, focusing on East Asia and China. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study US environmental policy.

Her main fields of research are critical security studies and environmental governance, and her research covers three interrelated topics: (1) a critique of securitization theory and its implication for understanding global governance; (2) energy security discourses; (3) environmental and climate security (including environmental conflict and securitization of natural resources).