Julia Melkers is ASU Foundation Professor of Public Policy in the School of Public Affairs and Director of the Center for Organization Research and Design (CORD). Her research focuses on the academic research system, how it engages with the broader environment, and how scientific careers advance in this setting. Her scholarly and applied interests have also focused on the developmental evaluation and measurement of research activities and outcomes, informed by extensive experience of more than two decades in advising and working with large interdisciplinary scientific teams.
In her role as CORD Director, she leads a group of interdisciplinary scholars whose research focuses on how organizations create new solutions to complex challenges by blending new technologies, scientific discovery, and human capital.
Her work has been funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, National Institutes for Health, and several foundations. She is the U.S. co-editor of the Journal of Research Evaluation (Oxford University Publishers). Dr. Melkers holds an honorary visiting appointment at INGENIO [CSIC], University Polytechnic Valencia, Spain, is an affiliated researcher with the Centre for Higher Education Transformations (CHET) in Bristol, U.K. and the Unit for Computational Humanities and Social Sciences (U-CHASS) in Granada, Spain. She was a Fulbright Specialist Program in Latvia, and has served as an advisor for the transformation of research units for the OECD (Austrian Higher Education system), INGENIO (Spain), Riga Stradiņš University (Latvia), among others. Prior to joining ASU, she was Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Research on Careers in Science (ROCS) lab at Georgia Institute of Technology. She has held faculty positions in the Andrew Young School at Georgia State University and at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She earned her Ph.D. in Public Administration from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.