Dr Julia Shore graduates with mathematics PhD while raising three children

UTAS graduate Dr Julia Shore wasn’t going to let her desire to pursue a PhD in mathematics and her wish to become a mum stand in her way. How she achieved her dream.

Dr Julia Shore has just graduated with a PhD in mathematics with her children Christopher 2, Benjamin 4 and Amberlynn 7weeks at the UTAS Sir Stanley Burbury Theatre. Picture: Chris Kidd

Dr Julia Shore wasn’t going to let her desire to pursue a PhD in mathematics and her wish to become a mum stand in her way.

After graduating last Tuesday, the 31-year-old mother of three children and University of Tasmania STEM star has proven you can do it all.

“I heard a lot of people wait until they get their career and buy a house by the time they start having children – by the time you get the PhD and everything else, you could be 33 years old,” she said.

“It wasn’t going to stop me from doing it. I did want both. I wanted to do a PhD but I also wanted to have a few children.”

Dr Shore said working on her PhD provided a flexible working life, perfect for juggling academics and raising the young minds of the future.

Dr Julia Shore has just graduated with a PhD in mathematics at the UTAS Sir Stanley Burbury Theatre. Picture: Chris Kidd

“I consider doing a PhD my nine to five job,” she said. “The tricky bit about PhDs is that you have a three year deadline and then you think you’ve heaps and heaps of time, you don’t need to rush anything.

“I just need to stay on point and not get too distracted. Maybe having children was helpful to say, well, I really have to get the work done.”

Dr Shores research was complex. She used mathematics to map evolutionary history.

“It is interesting to know when evolutionary events happened,” she said.

“We’re often trying to achieve that through analysing DNA sequences. For us to go from that to full evolutionary history is quite complicated and there’s lots of steps involved.”

While she didn’t really look at any data per say, she did find a two way relationship between phylogenetics and mathematics.

“We call the building evolutionary history phylogenetic. I actually found that phylogenetics could inspire interesting mathematical structures and then mathematics could inspire interest in phylogenetic processes,” she said.

“A fairly recent application of this was during Covid, when a new strain of the virus came about. Where did this strain come from? Is it closely related to this strain or that strain? And knowing when the new strain developed, and where it developed, that’s the evolutionary history we’re looking at. If we were to look at the evolutionary history of mammals, it’s not something that happened two months ago, it’s something that happened a million years ago.

“Maths is always helpful in helping us understand what’s happening and a strange place where maths is entwined provides inspiration for biology.