Julie Schell

Dr. Julie Schell is the Executive Director of Executive and Extended Education at the School of Design and Creative Technologies in the College of Fine Art at UT Austin. A prominent learning experience designer, Julie draws on over 20 years of experience in higher education and her early work in educational psychology to form her design practice. Julie is an expert in the science of learning and serves as an Assistant Professor of Practice at UT-Austin's top-ranked College of Education, where she teaches two popular learning design graduate courses: Technology and Innovation in Higher Education and Problems of College Teaching and Learning. These courses focus on using human-centered design and design thinking to address learning and education issues. Julie has a doctorate in Higher and Postsecondary Education from Teachers College, Columbia University and an M.S. in Counseling and Educational Psychology from the University of Nevada, Reno. She completed a four-year postdoctoral fellowship in pedagogical and learning innovation at Harvard University in 2013 under physicist Eric Mazur. She has held positions at the nation's top research universities, including Yale, Stanford, Columbia, Harvard and most recently The University of Texas at Austin. In 2014, Teachers College at Columbia University identified Schell as an Early Riser in Higher Education for her original contributions to the field. In 2009, her dissertation on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education was selected as the higher education dissertation of the year from the American Educational Research Association. Julie's scholarship focuses on incorporating the science of learning, design thinking, and human-centered design into the practice of learning experience design, and therefore teaching and pedagogy.