A/Prof Julie Willems has a background in health, education, and the social sciences. Predominantly a qualitative researcher, her scholarly profile demonstrates multiple strengths including educational equity, technology-enhanced learning (TEL) and work integrated learning. Broadly, the research foci are in the associated areas of health (rural health, community responses in emergencies and disasters, mental health, resilience, and trauma); online, distance and flexible learning; educational equity; educational technology; the scholarship of teaching and learning; undergraduate medical education; and workplace-based education and assessment of General Practitioners. 

A/Prof Julie Willems is an Associate Editor, Developing Teaching Practice for the Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice (JUTLP) and a Guest Editor for the Frontiers in Medicine special topic on Widening Participation and Access to Medicine as a Career.

She has previosuly held Executive positions with Australasian professional associations relating to teaching and learning. From 2011 to 2014, she held two terms elect in the Executive of the Open and Distance Learning Association of Australia (ODLAA) (https://odlaa.org). On the ODLAA Executive, her key contributions were  signing the ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ between ODLAA and DEANZ (now FLANZ, New Zealand) for cross-country collaboration, and as Vice-President of ODLAA in her second term. From 2015 to 2020, she held three consecutive terms in office on the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (ASCILITE) (https://ascilite.org). On the ASCILITE Executive, her key contributions to ASCILITE included policy writing, conference organising, conference handbook rewriting, the Community Mentoring Program, the Webinar series, and the Social Media team.

Supervisory interests include:

Teaching & Learning

• educational equity
• online, blended, flexible, and distance education
• workplace-based learning
• academic and professional development

Natural disasters

• trauma and resilience
• social media, back-channel communication and disasters
• disaster recovery
• intersectional expereinces in disasters

Domestic & family violence

• Rurality
• Faith-based
• Coercive control