Julie Stahlhut received a B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from MIT in 1979. She then worked in various technical fields for 12 years, until she remembered that she always wanted to be an entomologist when she grew up. As a student of non-traditional age, she earned an M.S. and Ph.D. in biological sciences from Western Michigan University, where she did research on inbreeding and sex determination in solitary wasps. She is now a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biology at the University of Rochester, where she studies various aspects of the biology of Wolbachia, a reproductive symbiont of many invertebrates.