Julie Peterson has spent more than three decades in healthcare and education, most of them helping people with brain injury rebuild their lives. As Founder and President of the Nevada Brain Injury Alliance, she brings survivors, families, and professionals together around one goal: making sure every Nevadan affected by brain injury has the knowledge and support to pursue recovery and independence.

Julie was recently elected to the Board of Governors of the International Brain Injury Association (IBIA), a global organization dedicated to supporting the multidisciplinary professionals who care for people with brain injury. She is also a voting member of the North American Brain Injury Society (NABIS).

Julie began her career as a speech-language pathologist. After a 1,000-hour post-graduate externship in neurological disorders at the Long Beach VA, she treated adults and children with traumatic and acquired brain injuries. She went on to serve as Area Regional Director of Operations for Kindred Healthcare, leading inpatient rehabilitation and long-term acute care hospitals across the western United States. After training at Johns Hopkins in its Progressive Early Mobility Model, she implemented the model across the 26 Kindred hospital programs she oversaw. She later served as CEO of the Centers for Neurobehavioral Excellence.

Today Julie is Director of the Nevada Community Enrichment Program (NCEP), a program of Accessible Space, Inc. and Nevada’s only nonprofit, post-acute comprehensive brain injury rehabilitation program. NCEP has held CARF’s highest level of accreditation since 1995 for adult and pediatric outpatient brain injury rehabilitation and adult residential brain injury rehabilitation and is a flagship among only a handful of comprehensive programs in the United States. Julie has personally led more than a dozen successful three-year CARF accreditations. Drawing on the NCEP model, she also opened an NCEP comprehensive cardiac rehabilitation program, certified by the American Association of Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Rehabilitation (AACVPR) with outcomes among the best in the nation.

Education has always been at the center of her work. Earlier in her career, Julie was an International Baccalaureate school administrator at Sandy Miller Academy of International Studies, a Las Vegas magnet school that Magnet Schools of America named the top magnet school in the nation.

Julie has created and taught training programs for clinicians on disorders of consciousness, cognitive rehabilitation following brain injury, utilization of assistive technology in classroom and vocational settings, and challenging behaviors following brain injury.  She has also trained many hospital and clinical teams to identify and reduce hospital-induced delirium and to provide early progressive mobility for ICU patients on ventilators. In 2025 she co-presented at the Brain Injury Association of America’s Neuro Rehab Leadership Summit, which was a great honor.

Julie holds a master’s degree in communicative disorders, summa cum laude, from California State University, Fullerton, and a master’s degree in educational administration. She has held the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association’s Certificate of Clinical Competence since 1995.