Apffel-Marglin finished high school at the Lycée Regnault, Tangier, Morocco.
In 2009 she founded a non-profit organization in the Peruvian High Amazon called Sachamama Center for Biocultural Regeneration (SCBR) that she directs.
SCBR collaborates with local indigenous communities on the re-creation of a pre-Columbian anthropogenic soil of millenarian fertility discovered by archaeologists.
[2] She also directs summer study abroad programs for US undergraduates at SCBR.
As part of that endeavor, she and Harvard economist Stephen Marglin formed an interdisciplinary and international collaborative team that has produced three books on critical approaches to development and globalization.