Obed Fulcar

Obed Fulcar is a bilingual, special education teacher in Washington Heights, New York City, with 13 years of experience in the NYC public education system. As an educator at the Maria Teresa Mirabal Middle School since 2006, he employs Environmental Science and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) education as a way to teach across all subjects to students with learning disabilities and bilingual students primarily from the Dominican Republic. He also created a STEM boat-building after school program and runs the NASA/Robotics club for the Children's Aid Society, at the Mirabal Sisters Campus.

Outside of the academic world he is very passionate about Friends of Sherman Creek, an all volunteer, community-based, parks advocacy group for public access to the waterfront, that he founded in 2005, in collaboration with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, that provides service learning and community service opportunities to teens in Washington Heights and Inwood, in NYC, in order to promote careers in science and conservation. The mission of the group is to create environmental education after school programs involving Citizen Science, aquatics studies and water quality monitoring as well as the preservation, restoration, and conservation of the salt marsh wetlands of Sherman Creek, on the Harlem River.

Mr. Fulcar has been the recipient of numerous awards including the 2005 Citizen Conservation Award from Columbia University CERC and the 2007 Environmental Educator of the Year Ezersky Award, from the NYC Council of the Environment. He is a past NOAA Teacher at Sea Alumni (2010) and a 2012 NASA Space Camp Fellow. He is married with two teenage children.