There are what you might call "traditional" paths in academia that advance in a very linear way. A person on one of these paths might go from undergrad to high-level administrator without ever having stepped outside the university system.
By that standard, Julie Wolter is far from traditional.
Wolter, who was appointed last year to lead Gonzaga University's freshly rebranded School of Health Sciences, spent her early career working in rural health care. After obtaining a master's degree from Western Washington University in speech-language pathology, she took a position in that field near Boise, Idaho.
"I worked a lot with pediatrics and children who had developmental language disorders, which also affected their ability to read and write," she explains.
What concerned her was that some of the children's language disorders had gone undiagnosed or untreated because the care network in these rural communities was lacking.
In one instance that Wolter cites as being pivotal to her own professional development, a 5-year-old boy was preparing to enter kindergarten, yet his speech was still mostly limited to echoing others' words. She quickly realized that he hadn't been receiving essential language interventions for his autism spectrum disorder.
"I saw that there was limited training, education and even knowledge about how best to help [the demographic] that we call a school-age population. That really was the impetus for me to return to school to get my Ph.D. to study and to educate others on best practices and supporting that particular population."
So Wolter returned to the halls of academia, but this time with a focus on, in her words, "how to translate research to practice" — that is, finding ways to ensure that what was being taught and studied in the university would ultimately have real-world impact.
"A really important piece to me," she says, "was that I had the clinical education that informed the academic side of things."
Later, during a decadelong stint at Utah State University, Wolter sought to lower some of the circumstantial barriers to education that faced aspiring speech-language pathologists, known in health care circles as SLPs.
Within the university's Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders and Deaf Education, she augmented the SLP program to offer "very high-quality, highly experiential learning with intensive immersion" to students who might have been restricted by traditional classroom-based learning.
The goal, she says, was to "essentially convert in-person training that was only in the summers ... into full, year-round distance access programming, where they would stay in their rural communities and serve and do their clinical rotations in those communities."
That was followed by a move back to her home state of Montana in 2015. In Missoula, where Wolter rose to become associate vice provost for innovation and online learning at the University of Montana, she built on her prior work in Utah. In particular, she wanted to ensure that other marginalized populations, such as tribal communities, were getting the health care professionals they needed.
To that end, she secured a $1.25 million U.S. Department of Education grant with a view to funding students "to be able to stay, serve, graduate and then become clinical specialists in those communities where there were severe critical shortages." One of the program's graduates went on to fill a 20-year vacancy in a rural Native American school district.
Along with programs like these, Wolter conducted research that had practical implementation in mind. A multiyear study she carried out through the National Institutes of Health was partly intended to be a resource for legislators tasked with crafting policies on screening young school-age children for dyslexia and developmental language disorders.
That track record of outward-looking programs and projects would become prelude to Wolter's new role as dean of Gonzaga's School of Health Sciences, where she aims to continue that approach through strategic collaborations, joint research and community-focused initiatives.
With one year now under her belt, she's already able to point to some key milestones that will set the stage for the near- and long-term. For example, a partnership between Gonzaga and the University of Washington will pool teaching resources, so med students as well as those in human physiology, public health and nursing will have access to expanded course offerings.
I have always seen my role as being about mentorship.
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"The mission of Gonzaga is very focused on cura personalis, care of the whole person, and how we serve the underserved," Wolter says. In her view, that institutional philosophy dovetails with her own desire to "create new opportunities for new interdisciplinary connections with the community and to expand health science programming into the areas that are needed in this community and region."
And there's one other important part of her professional journey that Wolter considers nontraditional.
"I have always seen my role as being about mentorship, specifically in the area of women leaders," she says. "That is maybe a path that hasn't been as clearly developed ahead of me, and I've needed to be that person to forge forward."
