Impactful Women of the 918: Julie Croff

Julie Croff’s passion for public health began as an undergraduate volunteering at a camp for children affected by HIV/AIDS. The experience showed her how stigma can influence whose health receives attention and resources—and helped shape a career focused on using research to improve people’s lives.

Today, Croff is a professor at Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences and leads the Center for Integrative Research on Childhood Adversity. She also co-leads Oklahoma’s site of the HEALthy Brain and Child Development Study, the largest long-term study of early brain and child development ever conducted in the United States.

“What excites me most is connecting discovery with impact,” Croff says. Her work has taken research beyond the university and into places where decisions are made, including serving as an expert witness related to opioid abatement and sharing research with legislators considering health and substance-use policies.

Croff is equally passionate about mentoring the next generation of researchers. She sees herself as both a mentor and a sponsor—helping others develop their skills while creating opportunities for their work and potential to be seen.

Ultimately, Croff wants research to make a tangible difference for Oklahoma families.

“The measure of success is whether what we learn makes life healthier and better for Oklahoma families,” she says.

Q&A with Julie Croff

Can you tell us about your career journey and what inspired you to pursue public health research?

One of the experiences that most profoundly shaped my career trajectory happened when I was an undergraduate student and volunteered at Camp Laurel, a camp for children infected with or affected by HIV/AIDS. At that time, the legacy of the early HIV/AIDS epidemic was still very visible. In the 1980s, HIV/AIDS was widely characterized as a disease affecting gay men and people who used drugs. Stigma toward the people most affected contributed to an inadequate scientific and governmental response to the disease. By the early 1990s, thousands of children in the United States acquired HIV each year, many through perinatal transmission. Children infected with HIV/AIDS were often excluded from ordinary childhood experiences, including sports and summer camps. Camp Laurel existed so these kids could make the kinds of memories that should be part of childhood. This experience fundamentally shaped my path and my passion. Public health response is about whose health we decide is worthy of attention, resources and scientific inquiry.

That experience also gave greater meaning to another part of my undergraduate work. I was a peer health educator on campus, giving presentations to other students about sexually transmitted diseases and alcohol and drug use. I loved the relational nature of that work: meeting people where they were and translating health information into something they could actually use.

I continued that approach while earning my MPH at Boston University, providing health education in bars in Boston. A third formative experience in undergrad came through the opportunity to visit the NIH Clinical Center and see biomedical research operating at a scale I had never encountered before. Together, those experiences showed me that public health can create change at multiple levels: scientific discoveries that change what we know can inform conversations at an individual level, programs that strengthen communities and policies that protect entire populations. I wanted a career that connected those ecological levels.

Can you briefly describe your role at Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences and the work you’re most passionate about today?

I am a professor at Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences with appointments in the Departments of Rural Health and Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Much of my work focuses on understanding how experiences from pregnancy through young adulthood shape health outcomes across the lifespan. I have the honor of leading the Center for Integrative Research on Childhood Adversity, or CIRCA, an NIH-funded Center of Biomedical Research Excellence that brings together scientists from multiple disciplines to understand biological correlates and mechanisms of childhood adversity and resilience, with a goal of identifying new prevention and treatment targets.

With my colleague Dr. Amanda Morris, I also lead Oklahoma’s site of the national HEALthy Brain and Child Development Study, or HBCD. HBCD is the largest long-term study of early brain and child development ever conducted in the United States. We are following families beginning in pregnancy and will continue following their children through childhood, using neuroimaging, biological measures, behavioral assessments and information about children’s environments to understand the many factors that shape healthy development.

This work is especially important in Oklahoma. Our state continues to experience substantial health challenges across the lifespan, including tobacco use and substance-related deaths, maternal and child health and access to behavioral health care. Oklahoma ranked 45th nationally in overall health in the 2025 America’s Health Rankings report, and more than 1,000 Oklahomans died from drug overdoses in 2024 alone. Those statistics are reasons to invest in solutions here. Oklahoma families deserve the same access to cutting-edge research, evidence-based prevention and scientific discovery as families anywhere else in the country. And because we have significant rural populations and communities that have historically been underrepresented in research, science conducted here can also help answer questions that haven’t been adequately answered nationally.

What excites me most is connecting discovery with impact. We can leverage our smaller state size and relationships to translate scientific inquiry into better prevention, health care, policies and systems that help Oklahoma children and families thrive.

Your work focuses on improving the health and well-being of Oklahoma communities. What has been one of the most meaningful moments or accomplishments in your career?

Some of the most meaningful moments in my career have happened when I’ve had the opportunity to bring scientific evidence outside of the university and into places where decisions are being made. I’ve served as an expert witness related to opioid abatement and have been invited to share research and data with legislators as they consider policies related to substance use, access to health care and treatment. Those opportunities are particularly meaningful to me because policy is one of the most powerful tools we have in public health. Good policies can create protections and environments that support healthier choices for entire populations.

Your colleagues describe you as someone who intentionally mentors and invests in others. Why has developing future leaders become an important part of your work?

There are far too many important scientific questions and not nearly enough time for any one person to answer them. Solving complex problems requires big teams and experts who know how to communicate and collaborate across disciplines. I also think about mentorship as more than helping someone become good at their job. I try to be both a mentor and a sponsor for the people I train. Mentorship means helping someone develop their skills and judgment; sponsorship means using your own position and relationships to help create opportunities for them and making sure their work and potential are seen.

In higher education, our students and trainees are our future colleagues. Investing in them is essential to our mission. If I can help develop people who are curious, collaborative, generous with their expertise and prepared to tackle difficult problems, the impact of that investment will extend far beyond anything I could accomplish individually.

What do you hope the long-term impact of your research will be for Oklahoma families and communities?

I hope our work helps build systems that make it easier for families to thrive. We often talk about supporting children, but we cannot truly support children without supporting their parents and caregivers. That means thinking beyond health care alone. Employers, schools, health care systems and communities all have roles in creating environments where families can be healthy. The HBCD Study, for example, will help us better understand how factors such as untreated or undertreated maternal depression during pregnancy may influence children’s neurobehavioral development in utero. Knowledge like that can help us identify opportunities to intervene earlier.

One lesson from Camp Laurel is that supporting children requires us to support the adults who care for them. Maternal health and child health are part of the same continuum. Ultimately, I hope our research helps move best practices out of scientific journals and into the systems families encounter every day. The measure of success is whether what we learn makes life healthier and better for Oklahoma families.

Outside of your work at OSU Center for Health Sciences, are there organizations, volunteer efforts or community causes that are especially meaningful to you?

Volunteerism is an important value for our entire family, and it is one of the things we love most about Tulsa. Our community has an incredible spirit of giving, showing up and sharing our most precious resource: time. Together with my husband, Ben, I serve on the leadership team for Tulsa Oktoberfest on the Games Committee. Tulsa’s Oktoberfest has been named the country’s best Oktoberfest by USA TODAY readers for the past two years. I’d like to believe that is at least partly because we keep people entertained. And because dachshunds are objectively the cutest part of Oktoberfest.

Our family also loves supporting some of Tulsa’s other signature events. During Tulsa Tough, we host members of D3stroy Cycling Club, and we host a rest stop for the Route 66 Marathon. We also enjoy volunteering together at the Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma, where packing and sorting food can become surprisingly competitive: How many boxes can we pack in two hours? Being part of community means contributing to it, and no one said you couldn’t have fun at the same time.

Anything you would like to share about your family, interests or hobbies?

We have two teenage boys, and our family spends a lot of time being active together, although some of us are considerably more competitive than others. Cycling is a big part of our family life. Tulsa’s River Parks trail system is one of our favorite parts of Tulsa, although the friends we see along the way are the real draw. One of our sons is also a competitive rower as part of the Tulsa Youth Rowing Association. Between cycling and rowing, we spend plenty of weekends cheering from roadsides and riverbanks.

I also love gardening and restoring our Tulsa home. There is something satisfying about caring for a place with history and thinking about what you preserve, what you improve and what you leave for the people who come after you.

More than anything, our family loves being part of Tulsa. It is a city where we can ride bikes along the river, volunteer together, host athletes from around the world, plant a garden, cheer at a race and somehow find ourselves judging dachshund activities at Oktoberfest. That combination of community, generosity and fun makes Tulsa home.