I grew up in Pennsylvania in a small town named Egypt (so... I can tell people I grew up in Egypt!).  After high school, I moved with my family about 30 miles north, and commuted to the nearby (if 25 miles is nearby) state college.  There, I initially studied to be a high school math and physics teacher.  I stuck with the math and physics, but dropped the teaching.  After graduation, I moved to western Massachusetts and went to graduate school at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

In graduate school, after the course work and qualifying exam, I initially worked in low temperature theory.  Our group worked closely with the low temperature experimental group.  My first project involved spin-polarized hydrogen, but I ended up doing my thesis on the flow of polymer fluids.

After finishing my degree, I taught at Mt. Holyoke College a bit, got married (to a physicist), did a post-doc in the polymer science department at UMass, did some consulting work, and had a baby.  Shortly thereafter, I moved with my husband to Minnesota, where he began a post-doc at the Univ. of Minnesota.  We had another baby, and he got a permanent job at Honeywell; he's still working at Honeywell.

I now reside in Bloomington with my husband (Burgess) and daughter (Gretchen, but she prefers to be called Ashley), and two cats (Sneeze and Stanley).  My son, Silas, is a college student and is home during breaks.  I began teaching at Normandale parttime in 1994, and fulltime in 1998.  Oddly enough, I started out as a very young girl wanting to be a teacher, and I ended up being a teacher!

One last vital bit of information:  The "A." stands for Anne, my given middle name, and the "Y." stands for Yaple, my maiden name.  Do you have any idea how many Julie A. Johnsons there are in the world?  Me neither, but there are very many, and I think most of them live in Minnesota!  That's one reason I kept the Yaple in my name.

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