Dr Julia Prior is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science, in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology (FEIT).

She has been awarded several citations and awards for her innovative teaching approach, including the CORE Teaching Award (2021) and a national Australian Award for University Teaching citation (2019), for outstanding contributions to student learning through the innovative Software Development Studio.

She was awarded the UTS' Teaching and Learning Award for ‘Strengthening the UTS Model of Learning’ (2018), in recognition of the professionally-engaged and research-inspired learning experience provided by the Software Development Studio (SDS).
She has presented and published work on the SDS at national and international forums, with the most recent conference e publication winning a Best Paper Award (Prior et al. 2019).

Her professional identity, and the passion that underpins it, lies in the nexus of her research, teaching and industry engagement in software development; founding the SDS was the direct result of this passion. The SDS is an initiative at the UTS that provides software undergraduates with an innovative industry-collaborative learning experience that more closely mirrors a technical professional context, embedded in an academic environment. The approach is unique in that the student teams working on real projects, with industry mentors, are mixed across subjects, degree courses and years.

She taught software development to FEIT undergraduate students in various degrees in software engineering, computer science, games development and information technology with a software major.

She was FEIT's Director, Engagement (Teaching and Learning) for 2 years, from December 2015 to February 2018.
For many years, she led others in the development of practice-based, active and reflective learning environments, which effectively prepare students for professional practice while providing opportunities for deep learning and scholarship, across a broad range of Engineering and Information Technology disciplines. She has led multiple teaching and learning projects in this area.

She was part of a multidisciplinary team that, in 2013, designed one of the UTS' most successful courses, the multidisciplinary Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation (BCII) combined degree, which focuses on high-level conceptual, collaborative and multidisciplinary ways of tackling complex problems. She has also taught in this course every year since it was first offered by UTS in 2014, teaching on transdisciplinarity and differing world views, in the third-year subject 'Leading Innovation'.

As a member of another transdisciplinary education team, in 2016, she led the curriculum design of the technology stream in the UTS' standalone Bachelor of Technology and Innovation (BTi) degree, first offered in 2017.

Her research focuses on people who perform technical work and their practices, performing in-depth industry-based studies of complex software development and the mechanisms that enable its more effective practice. Her PhD highlighted the complex, dynamic relations between professional software developers' everyday practices, their development infrastructure and the software products they develop.

She was awarded two Innovation Connection research grants from the Commonwealth, in 2017 and 2018, to deeply understand and improve software quality practices by viewing software development primarily as a human endeavour. This research was funded by a local software development company to continue this ethnographic, action research with her research team for another two years after the Commonwealth funding period (2019-2021).

She is a multi-faceted academic who contributed to UTS for 18 years in a full-time, continuing position. She is now working full-time in the software development industry, and is an adjunct academic supervising some HDR students and engaged with the Software Development Studio through an industry partnership.