Areas of Expertise
Amazonian and Mesoamerican Ethnobotany, Medical Ethnobotany, Medicinal Plants Research, Ethnomedicine, Ethnopharmacy, Agrobiodiversity, Quantitative Methods in Ethnobotany, Local environmental knowledge.
Research interests
- Medical Ethnobotany and Ethnopharmacy: determinants of medical knowledge among laypeople and experts. Including knowledge on medicinal plants and pharmaceuticals.
- Medical Anthropology: Ethnomedicine, determinants of laypeople medical knowledge, determinants of therapy choice.
- Link between ethnobotanical knowledge and health.
- Link between Agrobiodiversity and health.
- in-situ Conservation of Agrobiodiversity: Home gardens, participatory plant breeding, seed networks.
- Wild food plants and their contribution to diet.
- Local environmental knowledge and its transformations
Research carried out from 2003:
My PhD research focused on laypeople knowledge of medicinal plants and modern pharmaceuticals among Mazatecs, an indigenous group living in the Sierra Mazateca region in Southern Mexico a region of high biodiversity.
The aim of the research was to study how medical knowledge, whether traditional or not, is distributed among laymen and to what extent traditional medicine is competing with modern medicine in this rural context.
The research included 18 months of field work in indigenous communities in the Mazatec Sierra, Oaxaca, Mexico. This work led to two papers published in international peer-reviewed journals.
Previously, I carried out a study on the in-situ management of a famine food in a semi-arid desert in Southern Mexico. The study looked at the intraspecific variation of Enterolobium cyclocarpum to discern if a process of incipient domestication was taking place.
In 2006, I participated to a team research in two indigenous communities of lowland Bolivia, as part of a training on quantitative methods for research. This team work led to two papers published in international peer-reviewed journals.
I am currently conducting research in several Achuar indigenous communities in Ecuadorian Amazon. The research focuses on Achuar ethnomedicine and the main aim of the research is to collect information that can be used to support the integration of the use of traditional medicine with biomedicine.