Julie Bernhardt PhD

Julie is a clinician-researcher, NHMRC Established Fellow, and Senior Principal Florey Research Fellow at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, Melbourne. Julie has been working with people with stroke for 30 years.

She is Head of the Stroke Division at The Florey and leader of the AVERT Early Intervention Research Program. Working in a large multidisciplinary team of researchers, the focus of Julie’s group is the development and testing of new, exercise and rehabilitation interventions that aim to reduce the burden of stroke-related disability. Julie is Australia’s leading stroke rehabilitation trialist, recently completing the largest, international trial of early mobility-based rehabilitation ever conducted (AVERT), which included over 2000 patients from 5 countries.

She is the Director of the new NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence in Stroke Rehabilitation and Recovery which outlines an interdisciplinary program of work from the bench (discovery) to bedside (implementation) that aims to transform how we do stroke recovery research in Australia. She spearheads the first Stroke Rehabilitation and Recovery Roundtable, an international consortium of stroke experts who are setting new, agreed standards for recovery research.

A further passion of Julie’s is to improve the retention of women in science and to foster systemic change that sees more women able to lead and excel. She helped to found the Women in Science Parkville Precinct (WiSPP) collective impact initiative, which is supporting activity and change across 5 of Melbourne’s Medical Research Institutes.