Lessons in Stewardship

DPET Fellowship Program Manager, Julie Leemkuil, is a steward of the program and of the land she calls home

Story by Zach Read | Published May 7, 2024

Julie Leemkuil can’t decide which of the destinations she has been to in the world is her favorite. Bali has to be at—or near—the top. But so are Hong Kong and southern and northern Europe.

“It’s tough to beat sailing into Stockholm and the fjords of Norway in summer solstice,” Julie says.

The Mediterranean, of course, has Barcelona and Rome.

If you ask her where she wants to be today, though, it’s an easy answer.

“Hillsborough,” says Julie, who lives with her husband, Karel, on six acres in rural Orange County, North Carolina.

For many years, Julie, now the manager of the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics (DPET) Fellowship Program at the UNC School of Pharmacy, worked on cruise ships. She sailed the seas for months on end, working and living with people who became life-long friends.

Julie met Karel, an executive chef, on one of her trips. She and Karel immediately knew they thought alike. They agreed that they wanted to travel while they were young. Working on cruise ships was a way to do that. When they got older, they wanted to find a place to call home and relax.

While working together in the cruise industry, they bought a place in Miami Beach where they could stay when they were on three-month vacations from their work. After cruise life, they moved to Los Angeles for a brief period, then to Bethesda, Maryland, for more than a decade. Julie, who had spent her career in hospitality, worked for Marriott International while in Maryland, in food and beverage management and e-commerce.

In Bethesda, Julie and Karel became interested in gardening—in particular, they fell in love with growing flowers. The more they learned about flowers, the more they wanted to be surrounded by them. But they lived in a planned community in Maryland and their space was limited. They dreamed of having more space to pursue their interests, and they started thinking about where to go.

“It was between Portland, Oregon, and North Carolina,” Julie says. “We put big sticky notes on the wall and posted what was important to us, what we didn’t want, what our dreams were. We decided on North Carolina.”

When they moved to North Carolina, Julie looked for work. She started as a temp in the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy. Quickly, she found permanent work in the DPET Fellowship Program, which offers multiple two-year, industry-sponsored postdoctoral fellowships, as well as academic fellowships. She’d never worked in academia before.

“Academia was not a place I thought I’d go,” Julie shares.  “Eight years later, I take care of and mentor incoming fellows as part of a two-year industry fellowship.”

DPET fellows gain extensive training and experience in developing, writing, managing, and enrolling patients in clinical studies, as well as scientific and grant writing, publications, and presentation skills. In addition, during the first year of their fellowships, fellows take coursework related to their training program, including, but not limited to, biostatistics, pharmacokinetics, and pharmacogenomics. During the second year, fellows spend one year in industry, often at Triangle-area companies such as GlaxoSmithKline and United Therapeutics, working in drug development, clinical research, regulatory affairs, and medical affairs.

“Often they get hired by the company,” explains Julie. “Companies invest money in the fellow, then they have someone who has experience and can come in full-time at a higher level than another hire would.”

The experience has been professionally and personally rewarding.

“We recruit from September to December, get at least 250 applicants, and only take 10 to 20 of them,” says Julie, who calls her time at the school the best working environment she has ever been part of. “Our fellows come from all over the world. We help them get onboarded and situated. I love seeing when they first come in. They’re unsure what to do, how things work, then I see them when they’re finished and they have so much confidence and know what they want to do. It’s so great to see that growth and know they are moving on to make an impact in the world.”

Julie has traveled far from home to leave her mark on the world as well. A Montana native, Julie is a member of the Fort Belknap Indian Community, a reservation in north-central Montana. She and her family are registered as Assiniboine and are also Santee Sioux. Her father was born on the reservation. He wanted his six children to get a better education, so they lived in western Montana, in Missoula.

“One of my brothers is a wheat farmer on and surrounding the Fort Belknap reservation, where he farms 10,000 acres,” Julie says.

Julie remembers that one of her favorite things growing up was looking for wildflowers with her dad in the western mountains of Montana.

Today, Julie and Karel work their land in Hillsborough. They’ve become familiar with local wildlife and plants and have learned about farming from local farmers in Orange County. They’ve read books, watched videos, and grown as gardeners from trial and error. Recently, they expanded their fence to keep deer out and have built a native garden for pollinators. In the future, they plan to have a u-pick flower farm and to sell cut flowers.

“All annuals,” Julie says. “You name it, we’ll have it. Mostly ones that would look good in a bouquet. It’s not designed to be a big business, but it’s something we both love.”

For all their travels, Julie says that she and Karel no longer want to go anywhere.

“We wanted to find a place with acreage at the end of a dirt road, for some privacy, and that’s what we found in Hillsborough,” she says.

Now they simply want to garden.

“We plan to promote native plants and have a positive impact on the wildlife and soil,” she says. “We want to be good stewards of the land.”