Dr. Boyd-Judson is the founder of the Oxford Initiative's Global Women's Narratives Project and teaches in the medical narratives program at USC medical school.

Boyd-Judson held the UNESCO Chair for Global Humanities and Ethics from 2016-2019. She developed multi-university seminars on ethics and human rights in Oxford, Northern Ireland, Greece, Geneva, Hong Kong, Egypt, Turkey, and South Africa.

Boyd-Judson has a Ph.D. in International Relations from the University of Southern California and has studied previously at Vanderbilt University (MA program in religion). She completed a master's in international human rights law at the University of Oxford in 2020. Her dissertation focused on the legal right to mental health for women survivors of violence and armed conflict. Her research critiques the legal protections and procedures provided by States, specifically the challenges of trauma and complex vulnerabilities that contribute to the under-reporting and under-servicing of women's mental health post-conflict. She has participated in summer professional programs at Ohio State University (political psychology), London School of Economics, the Hague Academy of International Law, and the Harvard Medical School's Global Mental Health: Trauma and Recovery Certificate Program.

Dr. Boyd-Judson's books include Strategic Moral Diplomacy: Understanding the Enemy's Moral Universe (2011) and Women's Global Health: State Policies and International Norms (2014) with Patrick James. She has published in International Studies Quarterly, Foreign Policy Analysis, Carnegie Pew Case Studies in Ethics and Diplomacy (Georgetown University), and Leiden Journal of International Law.

After completing her Ph.D. at USC, she served as executive director of the University of Southern California's Institute for Humanities and Ethics for over eleven years. She taught graduate and undergraduate courses across the Honors Program, International Relations, Religion, and Journalism. Alongside teaching short courses at Oxford on global ethics and human rights issues, she also teaches narrative ethics in the Medical Narrative MS program at USC's Keck School of Medicine. 

Boyd-Judson founded the Global Women's Narratives Project (GWNP) in 2016 and co-founded the Oxford Initiative for Global Ethics and Human Rights in 2018 with Dr. Julia Amos (Oxford) and Dr. Melissa Rowe (RAND) to further ongoing global projects with faculty and policymakers. The Initiative—with offices in Oxford and Los Angeles—is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) partnership of projects between universities, institutes, nongovernmental organizations, and governmental actors, working together to build and support projects for the greater good.

She is a Pacific Council on International Policy member, serving as an observer of pre-trial hearings at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In the Fall of 2010, she was selected as a Global Ethics Fellow of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. In 2015, she was awarded two separate Fulbright Awards to Spain and China on strategic moral diplomacy, global ethics, and the university's role. Previous affiliations include RAND, the Carter Presidential Center, the Hong Kong Legislative Council, the United States Embassy Berlin-Third Reich Document Center, the USC Center for International Studies, the Walt Disney Company Asia-Pacific, and Dow Jones News Service.

Dr. Boyd-Judson has lectured on her work on strategic moral diplomacy at the US Air War College, the Council of Ministers of the European Union, the University of Oxford, the University of Madrid, the Fulbright Commission Spain, the Neimeyer Cultural Center of Spain, and the Center for International Studies at the University of Southern California. She has served on the executive boards of the International Political Science Association RC 29 and the International Studies Association-West and chaired the Women's Caucus for International Studies (ISA).