Emily MacLeod
- Honorary Senior Research Fellow, IOE - UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, University College London (2024 - present)
- VP Finance, Association of Postdoctoral Fellows at 51吃瓜网 (2024-present)
- Book Feature Editor for 鈥楻esearch Intelligence鈥�, British Educational Research Association (2023-2025)
- Executive Board Member, European Science Education Research Association (2022-2024)
- STEM Education
- Teacher Education, Pedagogy & Leadership
- Diversity, Identity & Indigenous Topics
- Identity studies
- Career aspirations and trajectories
- Teacher recruitment
- Teacher shortages
- Science education
- Educational inequalities
- Education policy
Emily MacLeod is a former teacher with expertise in conducting research with young people and teachers. Her research interests include teacher supply, young people's identities and career trajectories, and science (and STEM) education.
In her Postdoctoral Fellowship at McGill, Emily is using an identity lens to explore how volunteering as an outreach facilitator impacts STEM students' identity work and career trajectories in science and science teaching.
Emily's doctoral research consider which factors, experiences and attitudes prompt some young people to first want to become a teacher (especially in the sciences), and which factors enable these aspirations to sometimes be realised, and at other times dropped, as young people progress through education. Her thesis was the first study into young people's teaching trajectories, and used data spanning 11 years. Her PhD was funded by the UK's Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), with co-funding from the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Emily has experience working in consultancy and with the UK House of Commons' Education Select Committee, and is keen to ensure that her research can be translated for policy and practice audiences in order to inform real-world improvements in education.
- PhD, Education, University College London, UK
- MA, Education, University of Manchester, UK
- Postgraduate Certificate of Education (PGCE), French teaching, Sheffield Hallam University, UK
- LLB, Law and French, University of Leeds, UK
- 2024, Doctoral Thesis Award, British Educational Research Association (BERA), UK
- 2024, Geoff Whitty Doctoral Thesis Prize, University College London, UK
- 2023, Associate Fellowship, Higher Education Academy (AFHEA), UK
- * MacLeod, E. (2025). 鈥業鈥檝e always known that I would become a teacher鈥�: How White women narrate their choice to teach, and what this means for teacher recruitment. British Education Research Journal.
- MacLeod, E., & Avraamidou, L. (2025). Identity-based research in science education: Past, present, and possible futures. In Cakmakci, G. & Tasar. M. F. (Eds.), Connecting Science Education with Cultural Heritage: Selected Papers from the ESERA 2023 Conference. Springer.
- MacLeod, E. (2023). The status and safety of teaching: A longitudinal study of why some young people in England become teachers, and why others do not. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), University College London.
- Archer, L., DeWitt, J., Godec, S., Henderson, M., Holmegaard, H., Liu, Q., MacLeod, E., Mendick, H., Moote, J., & Watson, E. (2023). ASPIRES3 Main Report: Young People's STEM Trajectories, Age 10-22. London, UK: UCL Institute of Education.
- Moote, J., Archer, L., DeWitt, J., & MacLeod, E. (2020). Science capital or STEM capital? Exploring relationships between science capital and technology, engineering, and maths attitudes and aspirations among young people aged 17/18. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 57(8), 1228-1249.
- Francis, B., Archer, L., Moote, J., DeWitt, J., MacLeod, E., & Yeomans, L. (2017). The Construction of Physics as a Quintessentially Masculine Subject: Young People鈥檚 Perceptions of Gender Issues in Access to Physics. Sex Roles, 76, 156-174.
