Julie has devoted the last 18 years of her career to medicinal plants. Plants are a living repository of pharmacologically active chemicals, directly meeting healthcare needs and providing natural products for drug development. Julie is fascinated by medicinal plants and by the diversity of ways people have used the plants available to them across different cultures and at different times. She will talk about how methods from evolutionary biology have helped us to understand these uses.

Julie graduated from the University of Oxford with a DPhil, where she used molecular and morphological data to describe the diversity of a group of dry forest trees, collecting in Central America and Mexico to support her studies. From Oxford, she took up a Fellowship at the University of Cape Town, where she studied the genus Aspalathus, including Aspalathus linearis, which gives us redbush tea. She returned to the UK to take up a lectureship at the University of Reading, and has been there since. Her work has taken in diverse plant groups and regions, including the Fabaceae and Cactaceae, Mexico and the Cape Floristic Region of South Africa, and has always emphasised conceptual and methodological advances. In the last 18 years, medicinal plants have been her main focus.