India Summer Fellow, 2026
Julia Marden is a first year at UChicago and a Navy Veteran. She grew up primarily in the Boston area, but spent time in Malaysia and India as a teenager. After spending some time in college, she enlisted in the Navy as an Electronics Technician, Nuclear. She served onboard the USS Georgia, an Ohio class submarine, where she worked on and operated a small nuclear reactor. She was forward deployed three times, including once to the arctic circle, where she quickly learned how much she appreciated the warmth of steam piping. Julia is on the Molecular Engineering track, and intends to pursue a minor in Climate and Sustainable Growth. On campus, Julia serves as Co-Director of the UCSP Instrumentation Division, putting to good use her knowledge of electronics and instrumentation to help other students build and deploy instruments for scientific research.
She attended the India Summer Fellows Program in 2026.
“Being in India in a program focused so heavily on climate drove home the impact of climate change and pollution on the global south. The global north and in particular the US has a monopoly on causing change without suffering the consequences, and this program demonstrated more clearly this inequity for me, in a way that statistics and data can’t. I am more concerned than ever with climate change, but similarly more excited about the changing political and economic landscape of renewables and climate science. This program helped shape a lot of interesting ideas for me on the future of climate change, and the deep need for higher-level action. I am excited I was able to participate, and meet people whose relationship to climate change is so different from my own, and learn about the work that is being done to understand the impacts of global warming and environmental changes for both India and the world. There is a human aspect that can be lost when talking about these impacts, and I am amazed at how well the program was able to integrate lectures with site visits to keep this at the forefront of our minds.”