Julia Steinberger is a Professor of Ecological Economics at the University of Lausanne. From 2011 to 2020, she was an associate professor in ecological economics at the University of Leeds. Before she was a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Social Ecology in Vienna (SEC), where she investigated sustainable cities and the links between material use and economic performance, held postdoctoral positions at the Universities of Lausanne and Zurich, and obtained her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research examines the connections between resource use (energy and materials, greenhouse gas emissions) and societal performance (economic activity and human wellbeing).

She received a Leverhulme Research Leadership Award for her research project 'Living Well Within Limits' investigating how universal human well-being might be achieved within planetary boundaries. She was the Lead Author in working group 3 for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)6th Assessment Report, contributing to the report's discussion of climate change mitigation pathways.