Julia Zur, Ph.D.
National Institute of Drug Abuse
Julia Zur, Ph.D., is Health Scientist Administrator at the National Institute of Drug Abuse’s (NIDA) Services Research Branch working primarily on the Justice Community Opioid Innovation Network (JCOIN). She received her Ph.D. in Mental Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a B.S. in Neuroscience and Psychology from Muhlenberg College. Dr. Zur also completed a fellowship at The George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health, where she worked on a range of projects related to understanding how Medicaid expansion and other changes under the Affordable Care Act affected access to health care, including behavioral health services, among vulnerable populations.
Prior to her current position at NIDA, Dr. Zur worked at the Kaiser Family Foundation, where she led the organization’s opioids-related work and focused primarily on understanding Medicaid’s role in addressing the opioid epidemic. She also worked at SAMHSA on the federal regulation that increased the buprenorphine patient limit from 100 to 275 and on the Protecting Our Infants Act Report to Congress, which outlined federal efforts aimed at addressing prenatal opioid exposure and neonatal abstinence syndrome and proposed a strategy for continuing to address these issues. Earlier in her career, Dr. Zur worked at the Treatment Research Institute, where she worked on an NIAAA-funded study aimed at improving access to wrap-around services for individuals in substance use disorder treatment.