Amy Shackelford, PhD, has joined the SustainERA research team as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Natural Sciences and Health.
Originally from the United States, Dr. Amy Shackelford has been working in the social work field for seventeen years with a focus on community organizing and program development. After completing her Bachelor of Social Work program in 2010, she went on to work as the Executive Director of Central Indiana Jobs with Justice, a coalition working to build class solidarity. Following this, she completed her dual Master of Social Work and Master of Public Health degrees, after which she relocated to Cape Town, South Africa to work at the Scalabrini Centre of Cape Town. While in South Africa, she assisted in developing community led programming for women with refugee and migration backgrounds. In 2019, she returned to her hometown of Indianapolis to work as the Program Director at the Immigrant Welcome Center. During this time, she also worked as an adjunct professor at Indiana University Indianapolis where she taught Executive Leadership and Social Policy to Master of Social Work students.
In 2021, Amy relocated to Europe as a funded PhD student in the ASTRA Project, a Marie Curie program. She completed her PhD in August 2025 in Finland and published her dissertation “Ecosocial Work and Third Sector Organizations: Exploring the Ecosocial Features of an Organization through Case Study Research”. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Tallinn University as part of the SustainERA project, where she will conduct case study research on higher education institutes in Europe to evaluate potential barriers and catalysts of individual-level competencies that impact institutional level sustainability work.
