Dr Amelia Farber is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute of Education at the University of Reading. Her fellowship extends the impact of her doctoral work with young children living in the Galapagos Islands on environmental education. In her fellowship, she will be developing useable resources for teachers and local organisations, creating international collaborations in environmental and climate education, curating proposals for larger fellowships and grants, and disseminate her work through academic papers, school-oriented reports, academic conferences, workshops for UK teachers, and general audience blogs. She will revisit the Galapagos Islands to host workshops with local teachers and organisations to discuss child centric local ecological knowledge programmes, to visit and lead presentations with the Charles Darwin Foundation, and to collaborate with and jointly host a hybrid symposium with students and faculty of the Universidad San Francisco de Quito - Galapagos branch. 

She is an environmentalist with passions in environmental and climate education, environmental emotions, polycrisis awareness and action, ecological justice (including humans), and equity. She holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford’s Department of Education, which focused on learning from younger children in the Galápagos Islands what they know and how they learn about their local ecology and environment. Her work is child centric, ecocentric, and seeks to learn from historically and contemporarily excluded human and more-than-human voices. She co-founded and continues to co-run the Oxford-based ‘Climate Change Education Reading Group, and was a finalist for PhD Student of the Year for support, mentorship, and event organisation services to the students of the Department of Education. She has presented her work internationally at conferences including the British Educational Researcher Association, the European Conference on Educational Research, the American Association of Geographers, the Comparative and International Education Society, the Nature Connection Conference at Derby, the Natural Start Alliance, and the North American Association for Environmental Education. Her work has been published in Environmental Education Research, International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, and the Oxford Review of Education. She has also supported youth-led blog publications through the Department of Education at Oxford, the North American Association of Environmental Education, and the Oxford Climate Society.

She previously was an Environmental Change Research Fellow at Reuben College in the University of Oxford, where she served as a college advisor for masters students and was an active member of the Reuben community especially within the environmental change theme. She held a postdoctoral researcher position within the Oxford Department of Education working on Net Zero and climate change education. The Net Zero Education project involved in-school fieldwork interviewing and observing teachers during climate change lessons with secondary students, conceptualising how to teach about net zero emissions with transdisciplinary researchers, and working with a 25-student Youth Advisory Board who created accessible resources for students and teachers about net zero.  

She advises EcoEducate, a nonprofit focused on sustainability education within Latin America, on evaluation of environmental and sustainability literacy in secondary schools. She has taught courses in education for undergraduates, in methodology and research design for masters students in education, and on advanced qualitative research for doctoral students in the social sciences. She has co-supervised masters students within education, through to dissertation submission.

Prior to her doctoral work and re-entering the academic space, she worked for six years in multinational tech start-ups and scale-ups running international partnerships across Latin America, Europe, South Africa, and Australia. Within these manager and director roles, she also ran internal and partnership enablement and training, business development, and event marketing. She holds a Masters degree in Latin American Studies from Stanford University, for which she received a Federal Language Acquisition Fellowship to learn Peruvian Quechua. She also holds bachelors degrees in both Anthropology and Music from Stanford University. She earned honors in both of her undergraduate degrees, and produced an undergraduate honors thesis based on solo anthropological research in the Galapagos within schools, focusing on environmental literacy. She was awarded a Major Grant, the Beagle II Award, and a grant from the Woods Institute for the Environment while at Stanford, to conduct the research in Galapagos.