Julia Metzker

Julia Metzker serves as Director of the Washington Center for Improving Undergraduate Education at The Evergreen State College. Julia received her first degree from The Evergreen State College where she learned first-hand the value of a transformative liberal arts education. She obtained a doctoral degree in inorganic chemistry from the University of Arizona and completed a postdoctoral appointment at the University of York in the United Kingdom. In her 10 years as a chemistry professor at Georgia College, she discovered the power of community-based learning to engage students in learning that matters. After serving as the inaugural Director of Community-based Engaged Learning at Georgia College she moved to Stetson University as the founding Executive Director for the Brown Center for Faculty Innovation and Excellence. During her journey of discovering herself as an educator, she was fortunate to find a cohort of like-minded university educators who co-founded the Innovative Course-building Group (IC-bG) - a grass-roots social network for learning that supports teaching faculty and staff across disciplines. She believes in reimagining and reclaiming the democratic potential of assessment, work she champions as a member of the Imagining America's “Assessing the Practices of Public Scholarship” research group. She and her partner, Joe, raise chickens and bees with the help of an unruly Australian Shepherd in the Pacific Northwest.