Associate Professor Julia Slark is the Head of School of Nursing at Waipapa Taumata Rau/University of Auckland. She qualified as a Registered Nurse in London, UK in 1993. She has 15 years’ experience as a senior clinical nurse specialist in Stroke patient care, and was part of the team at Imperial College NHS Trust which implemented the London-wide, new stroke strategy to provide urgent hyper-acute stroke interventions to London regional populations in 2009. Julia obtained her PhD from Imperial College London, in 2012 which looked at risk awareness as a tool to improve secondary stroke prevention strategies. Since arriving in New Zealand in 2013, Julia has led two stroke development projects in Auckland and Waikato to implement hyper-acute stroke services and she coordinates New Zealand’s only stroke specialty nursing course. She was the academic director of the BNurs programme at the University of Auckland for five years prior to taking up the position of Head of School in 2019. Julia is the inaugural Chair of the Stroke Nurse Forum Aotearoa which was established in November 2020. Julia is an enthusiastic and committed nurse, educator and researcher who is passionate about providing the highest standards of care to patients. Her research interests include nursing, education and all aspects of stroke patient care.