Julia Irwin joined Southern in 2008 and rose through the faculty ranks to earn a full professorship in psychology in 2017. She has an extensive publication record, with her work focused on audiovisual speech perception in children, including those with autism spectrum disorders. Prior to her appointment as as interim dean of the SCSU School of Graduate and Professional Studies in 2022, Julia was a senior research scientist at Haskins Laboratories and the director of the LEARN Center at Yale University.

Closing in on being a member of our SPAR million-dollar club, Julia has been Principal Investigator on several grants from the NIH Division of Deafness and Communication Disorders. Importantly, she has also mentored many of our Southern scholars at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Julia’s wide-ranging extra-curricular contributions include serving on the BOR Faculty Awards Committee, as Coordinator of STEM Grants and Contracts, as a member of PACES, and as the university’s Research Integrity Officer and Director of Research Protection.

She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the State University of New York, Oswego, and holds an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut.