Friends School Welcomes Dr. Erle Ellis P’22, ’27, as the Earth Day Keynote Speaker

Photo Credit: UMBC

Friends School of Baltimore is excited to welcome Dr. Erle Ellis P’22, ’27 as our 2026 Earth Day keynote speaker. Dr. Ellis is a professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). 

Dr. Ellis’ work focuses on understanding and exploring the ecology of human landscapes and their changes from local to global scales, including human transformation and sustainable stewardship of the biosphere, tools for global synthesis of local knowledge, and for measuring and managing ecological change across human landscapes around the world, with a special focus on villages in China.

At UMBC, Dr. Ellis teaches courses in environmental science and landscape ecology. Before teaching at UMBC, he taught ecology at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He studied at Cornell University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in biology and a doctorate in plant biology. Dr. Ellis is a Senior Fellow of the Breakthrough Institute, has published over 100 scientific articles, and has been honored as both a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Martin School and as the 2025-2026 UMBC Lipitz Professor.

In addition to being our Earth Day keynote speaker, Dr. Ellis will offer an Earth Day workshop for our Upper School students.