Amber Reed

Amber R. Reed holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a professor at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, and her ongoing research site is in rural South Africa. Her work examines the political socialization of young people in the post-apartheid state. Though her background is in cultural anthropology, she is trained in all four sub-disciplines of the field (including biological anthropology) and loves being a part of the Evolution course!

Dr. Reed began her work at the Museum as the After-School Program Coordinator, during which time she taught courses in anthropology to high school students and also supervised independent research projects in the sciences. More recently, she served as the content advisor for the Museum's Human Bulletins news stories, helping to translate recent scientific discoveries in the field of human evolution to the public through short video segments that are then showcased in the Hall of Human Origins and on the Museum website. She greatly enjoys making science accessible to a broader audience through teaching and writing.

Amber’s interest in questions of evolution began when she worked with vervet monkeys in Limpopo, South Africa after finishing her undergraduate degree at Barnard College. She started as a volunteer and ended up training other volunteers in conservation-oriented projects that relied upon an in-depth understanding of primatology. Since then, she has both taken and taught several courses that asked questions about how humans evolved, their relationship to other primates, and how these processes highlight larger mechanisms of evolution.