Julie O’Brien, Ph.D. is a behavioral scientist working at the intersection of wellbeing and technology.

She’s spent her career designing and testing scalable solutions that close the gap between what people want to do and what they actually do.

Julie’s career bridges the academic world and the product world. She believes that basic research has enormous value for product and service design, and that everyone can learn to think like a behavioral scientist. To that end, she has developed a framework to introduce the underlying drivers of human behavior to product and service designers. She firmly believes that behavioral science can best solve real-world problems when integrated into existing systems in a holistic way, across multiple touchpoints and channels.

Julie has designed products, started two nonprofits, and studied the full range of human behavior from energy efficiency to racial discrimination to diabetes self-management - in the US and abroad. Through this work she has learned that humans are humans - the same fundamental processes are at play, regardless of what things look like on the surface.

She is the Head of Behavioral Science and Coaching at US Bank, a newly-elected member of the board of directors for the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts. She created the behavioral research function at Opower, led the health initiative at Duke University’s Center for Advanced Hindsight, and most recently built out Applied Behavioral Science at WW.

She holds in PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Maryland.

Follow her on Twitter @jdpobrien or reach out below.