The human biologist has been interim director of the center since 2023 and is also co-director of the Galapagos Science Center.
With over a decade of experience working in the Galápagos Islands, Amanda Thompson has contributed to strengthening the relationship between UNC-Chapel Hill’s Center for Galapagos Studies and the Galapagos Science Center — a facility on San Cristóbal Island in the Galápagos that is supported by a partnership between the Universidad San Francisco de Quito and Carolina.
Thompson is the Thomas Willis Lambeth Distinguished Chair in Public Policy in the Department of Anthropology, a professor in the Department of Nutrition, and a faculty fellow at the Carolina Population Center. Trained in human biology and nutritional epidemiology, her work focuses on pathways linking early life social, behavioral, and physical environments to long-term health across a range of national and international settings, including North Carolina, China, and Ecuador. She is particularly interested in how early life nutrition and environmental exposures shape obesity and disease risk.
During her time as interim director of the Center for Galapagos Studies (CGS), Thompson raised over $2 million in sponsored research funding and gifts to support infrastructure, faculty and student projects, and community outreach, including a grant from the William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust to establish the Kenan Galapagos Fellows Program. The graduate students that make up this inaugural cohort span disciplines and have recently started their projects, which aim to help build healthy ecosystems on a changing planet.
Thompson is also committed to providing seed grants to junior faculty at Carolina who want to pursue new collaborative projects on the islands. She will continue guiding the growth of CGS with her vision for an interdisciplinary, solutions-oriented, community-engaged research center focused on social marine and terrestrial systems, as well as ecosystem health and island sustainability.
Thompson received her undergraduate degree from Harvard University and her MPH in Global Health/Nutrition and PhD in Anthropology from Emory University. She held a postdoctoral position at the Gillings School of Global Public Health and the Carolina Population Center before joining the anthropology department in 2007. She is the recipient of the 2014 Human Biology Association Michael A. Little Early Career Award and the 2019 Norman Kretchmer Memorial Award in Nutrition and Development from the American Society for Nutrition.
