Ambyr Amen-Ra

Ambyr Amen-Ra is the Director of Project Management and User Support (PuMUS) at ICPSR. She joined ICPSR in 2018 as a project manager with the Education and Child Care Data Archive. In 2020, she became one of the first three PuMUS team leads and later served as Interim Associate Director before assuming her current role as director.

Ambyr is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) and brings a strong focus on structure, collaboration, and continuous improvement to her work. Under her leadership, PuMUS ensures that data producers have a trusted place to share their data and that researchers can easily discover and use it. The unit promotes ICPSR’s data through webinars, data fairs, and training opportunities designed to help researchers learn how to work with ICPSR’s resources.

She holds a BS in Movement Science from the University of Michigan and an MA in Sociology from Southern Illinois University–Edwardsville (SIUE). Ambyr played a key role in bringing the Dunham’s Data Series to ICPSR—a three-year initiative (2018–2021) funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council that encouraged dance historians to use data to visualize the global influence of Katherine Dunham, the renowned American dancer, choreographer, anthropologist, and social activist.

Outside of work, Ambyr enjoys traveling with her husband and their three young children.