Julee Snyder

Julee Snyder is a policy associate with the Heat Policy Innovation Hub at the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability. Snyder received her master’s degree in public health from George Washington University’s Milken Institute and her bachelor’s degree in anthropology with a music minor from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her master’s research focused on environmental epidemiology, specifically the impact of climate on public health. Snyder comes to the Nicholas Institute after a 20-year career in the wellness industry, including time at Duke Integrative Medicine, and a year in research conducting systematic reviews of primary evidence at the US Department of Veterans Affairs.

Two little-known facts: (1) Snyder had a dance company—The Postcards Project—after a two-year stint at the Amsterdam School of the Arts. She toured the NC Dance Festival and performed in Durham at the American Dance Festival in their locally grown series. (2) Snyder went to osteopathic medical school for a year at the Western University of Health Sciences in California after completing her prerequisites at North Carolina State University. It wasn’t the right fit, so she came back home to North Carolina and resumed her practice in massage and yoga therapy.

Bewilderment by Richard Powers: An intimate tale about a family’s reckoning with loss. Powers is a powerful science writer who manages to lull the reader into a glorious state of bliss that one knows, through the power of the narrative arc, will end. It creates an appropriately heart-wrenching tension that captures the value of our work on climate and ecosystem protections at the Institute.

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson: An epic piece of scholarship detailing the US Great Migration post-reconstruction (1940s-1960s). Wilkerson captures the lived experiences of three individuals who embody three migratory patterns over three different decades, and then contextualizes their stories into the larger historical events that include Jim Crow, the Green Book, urban race riots, the rise and fall of Martin Luther King Jr., white flight, and redlining.