Julie Posselt is Associate Professor of Education at the University of Southern California and a 2015- 2017 National Academy of Education/ Spencer Foundation postdoctoral fellow. Her research examines organizational behavior affecting access to and equity in selective sectors of higher education, especially graduate education, research universities, STEM fields, and the professoriate. Her work has been funded by the US Department of Education, Spencer Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and National Science Foundation. She is presently a Principal Investigator on 4 NSF-funded projects working to advance equity and inclusion in STEM doctoral programs and research settings. She directs the California Consortium for Inclusive Doctoral Education as well as the Inclusive Graduate Education Network’s Research Hub. In 2017 Posselt was honored with the Association for the Study of Higher Education’s Early Career/ Promising Scholar award, and in 2018 received the American Educational Research Association’s Early Career Award.
Posselt is the author of Inside Graduate Admissions: Merit, Diversity, and Faculty Gatekeeping (Harvard University Press, 2015), an award-winning ethnographic comparative study of faculty decision making in doctoral admissions. Her second book is under contract with Stanford University Press, and additional research is published in the American Educational Research Journal, Annual Review of Sociology, Journal of Higher Education, Research in Higher Education, and Chronicle of Higher Education, among others. She is a member of the editorial review board for the Journal of Higher Education and Journal of Diversity in Higher Education.