Amber Zoe Smith

Amber Zoe Smith is the associate director of peer education programs for the Student Success Center at Virginia Tech, where she coordinates the Tutoring and Peer Academic Coaching programs. Amber has worked in peer education programs in higher education since 2014; she started in the Virginia Tech Honors College, where she coordinated honors first-year seminars, reading seminars, and was the founding director of the Honors Peer Advising Center. Then she coordinated Radford University's first-year seminar program and associated peer educator training before joining the Student Success Center in 2019. At the Honors College and Radford, she developed and taught Peer Education Practicum courses; now she provides all three levels of College Reading and Learning Association training for peer educators through the Student Success Center.

Amber has presented on peer education nationally and internationally at the Honors Education at Research Universities Conference, the Utrecht Honours Conference, the International Honours Conference in Windesheim, the Conference on Higher Education Pedagogy, the Advising Matters Conference, and the National College Learning Center Association Conference. Her peer education work has also been published in Honors in Higher Education and the Journal of the European Honors Council.

In addition to coordinating the launch of Peer Education Programs (PEP) at Virginia Tech, Amber directly supports the Peer Education Academy and wrote the training modules on Peer Education Foundations. She is also the copy editor for the Journal of Peer Learning.