AERC Welcomes: Dr Samantha-Kaye Johnston
AERC is excited to welcome Dr. Samantha-Kaye Johnston to our team.
Dr. Samantha-Kaye Johnston has joined our team at AERC as a McKenzie Research Fellow. She completed her PhD in Psychology at Curtin University, where her research focused on the reading development of primary school students. Her work has been recognised with the Chancellor’s Commendation for Outstanding Doctoral Research and has also earned her a nomination for the Prime Minister’s National Youth Awards in Jamaica in the category of Academia.
At AERC, Dr. Johnston is currently exploring how AI-enabled EdTech ecosystems can be (re)designed not just to personalise learning, but to empower students with autonomy, fostering their growth into critical readers and thinkers.
Dr. Johnston has worked as a Product Manager in the EdTech industry and previously held a career in telecommunications. She has always been drawn to the intersection of technology, learning, and human autonomy.
Later, she re-joined academia as a Research Associate at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education and Department of Computer Science, where she conceptualised and led projects such as the Digital Autonomy Machine Experiment and On Whose Terms in EdTech Implementation, research initiatives that challenge conventional thinking around autonomy, data use in learning, and ethics in education. She has also been a long-standing tutor with the Global Development Institute based at Regent’s Park College, Oxford, where she has led tutorials and lectures on critical reading and thinking. Her work has also been supported through a Jesus College, Oxford-funded initiative, where she led Project Amplify, co-designing ethical guidelines for the Metaverse with young children in Jamaica.
Beyond research, she shapes conversations about AI and human identity as the co-editor of the Personhood Unit at Oxford University Press’s AI in Society Intersections series. She also contributed to policy work through her consultancy work with the USAID-LEARN to Read program, helping to develop Nigeria’s National Reading Framework, officially launched in 2023.