From a creationist household to the head of America's science-defense nonprofit

Amanda L. Townley, Ph.D., is President and CEO of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), the leading U.S. nonprofit defending the accurate teaching of evolution and climate science in public schools. She took the role in December 2023, becoming only the third person to lead the organization since its founding in 1981.

She did not arrive at this work as an outsider looking in. Townley was raised in a young-earth creationist home in rural northeastern Alabama, inside a worldview built on a literal reading of scripture. Her path from that upbringing to leading the country's foremost voice for evolution education gives her something most advocates in this space lack: firsthand knowledge of exactly what it takes to hold a conviction, question it, and change a mind without dismissing the people who hold it.

Before NCSE, Townley was an Associate Professor of Middle Grades and Secondary Science Education at Georgia Southern University, where her research focused on the intersections of science and society — specifically why people accept or reject evolution and climate science, and how misconceptions about the nature of science get weaponized in anti-science movements. That research now shapes how NCSE trains teachers, tracks classroom threats, and engages the public.

Townley currently serves as President of the Association for Science Teacher Education (2025–2027 term) and is Past President of the National Association of Biology Teachers, where she also chaired the Evolution Education Award Committee for three years. She has served as an expert panelist for NPR's Science Friday, partnered with the Smithsonian Institution on evolution-education research, and was profiled by Science magazine ahead of her appointment to NCSE. In 2025, she was featured in Smithsonian Magazine's coverage marking 100 years since the Scopes Trial, and her commentary has run in Scientific American, EdWeek, and Forbes.

Her honors include the University of Alabama College of Education's 40 Alumni Under 40, the Emerging Scholar Award from the American Educational Research Association's Religion & Education group, and NABT's Evolution Education Award and Biology Education Research Award. She is a Sinai & Synapses Fellow through the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, and a full member of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society.

For leaders navigating their own polarized terrain — boards, employees, and customers who don't all start from the same premises — Townley's career is a working case study in how to lead across that divide without losing the argument or the relationship.