David J. Julius was born and grew up in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, New York, where he lived with his parents and two brothers, one older and one younger. His father was an engineer and his mother an elementary-school teacher. Julius attended the local grammar school, but he tested into Peter Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. He commuted there for a year before deciding that though the social and entertainment life in Manhattan surpassed those in Brooklyn, he preferred to go to the local high school, Abraham Lincoln High School. He was interested early in the sciences, although he did not particularly enjoy school. He attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his BS in 1977. He then obtained his PhD from University of California at Berkeley in 1984. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Cancer Research at Columbia University; he then was an associate at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Columbia University. In 1989 he was appointed assistant professor at the University of California at San Francisco, where he remains. He is the winner of a number of awards, including the Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences award, and has published many papers. Julius's major areas of interest include yeast genetics, the secretory pathway, Xenopus and Aplysia, neurobiology, electrophysiology, mouse genetics, and the serotonin receptor. He is married to Holly A. Ingraham.