I’m a PhD student in ethnobotany, with a passion for conserving biodiversity and improving human livelihoods. I am part of the IEK-Changes team and together with the Tsimane’ people in Bolivia we are researching how Indigenous knowledge of plants is changing and what effect this has on local environmental management and biodiversity conservation.
I hold two MSc degrees: one in Forest and Nature Conservation and one in Ethnobotany, both from Wageningen University, the Netherlands. My previous research is varied but has always been focussed on Indigenous and local environmental knowledge – the nexus of human culture and biology. I have studied agroforestry systems of the Kichwa people in the Ecuadorian Amazon, worked with the Taruma people in Guyana to retrace their past through linguistics and plant knowledge, and advised botanical gardens on the topic of decolonisation.