Ernesto Viveiros de Castro
Ph.D. student in Interdisciplinary Ecology, School of Natural Resources and Environment; M.S. in Ecology and B.Sc. in Biology from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Ernesto is working towards a TCD graduate certificate and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Ecology under direction of Dr. Taylor Stein from Forest Resources and Conservation. Ernesto is a biologist from Brazil who has been working in Protected Areas Management for 17 years. Currently he maintains his work as an environmental analyst and researcher at ICMBio (Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade), the agency that manages Brazilian Federal Protected Areas. Prior to coming to UF Ernesto was Manager of the Serra dos Órgãos National Park (2004-2011), General Coordinator of Public Use at ICMBio (2011-2012) and Manager of the Tijuca National Park (2012-2018). He is also a member of World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA-IUCN) and the Tourism and Protected Areas Specialist Group (TAPAS-IUCN). Ernesto got his M.S. degree studying differential extinction vulnerabilities of small mammals in fragmented landscapes in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. As a park manager Ernesto conducted research on nature-based tourism, as well as animal reintroductions, and invasive species. As a Ph.D. candidate he is interested in understanding the influence of the main US National Scenic Trails (Appalachian Trail, Pacific Crest Trail, and Continental Divide Trail) on hikers, communities, and landscapes, assessing if these trails play an important role as conservation strategies and their potential to promote nature conservation in Brazil and other countries.
Ana María Garrido Corredor
Ph.D. student in the Anthropology Department; M.Sc. in Environmental Anthropology at the University of Kent, United Kingdom; B.A. in Anthropology and B.Sc. in Biology from Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia.
Ana María is working towards a TCD graduate certificate and a Ph.D. in Anthropology student under advisement of Dr. Catherine Tucker. For the past eight years, she has been working on various projects concerning socio-environmental conflicts, resource governance, and community-based conservation. Her research has focused on understanding the impacts of extractive economies, particularly gold mining, on the livelihoods of afro-descendant communities inhabiting the Pacific Region of Colombia. Additionally, during the last three years, she has been working in the Science-Policy interface in Colombia, designing and implementing environmental policies to strengthen local initiatives for the sustainable management of natural resources. From these experiences, she developed her current research interests, which focus on understanding how global conservation agendas, coupled with national and international economic processes, intersect with the everyday politics of resource management and use and shape the cultural and symbolic meaning of human-forest interactions. Ana María is interested in conducting interdisciplinary research, combining qualitative methods such as participant observation and interviews, and methodologies of economic botany, mainly ethnobotanical inventories, as complementary ways of understanding the relationship between plants and people in agroforest landscapes.
Sinomar Fonseca Jr.
Ph.D. Candidate in Interdisciplinary Ecology, School of Natural Resources and Environment; M.S. in Tropical Biology and Natural Resources from the Amazonia Research National Institute (INPA); B.S. in Biological Sciences from the Federal University of Uberlandia, Brazil.
Sinomar is working towards a TCD graduate certificate and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Ecology under direction of Dr. Stephen Perz from Sociology, Criminology& Law. Sinomar has been working on conservation and protected areas management for the past 16 years in the Brazilian Amazon. He has worked with participatory monitoring programs, management plans with a focus on capacity building of a variety of stakeholders and local empowerment and involvement. Since 2019, he engaged as a graduate assistant in the Community of Practice and Learning (CoP-L) of TCD’s Governance and Infrastructure Project in the Amazon (GIA) project. For his dissertation research, Sinomar has focused to study the strategies indigenous peoples use to mobilize for rights facing development and infrastructure projects in the Brazilian Amazon
Felipe Veluk Gutierrez
Forest Resources & Conservation PhD candidate, with a concentration in Tropical Conservation and Development. MSc in Management and Conservation of Tropical Forests and Biodiversity from CATIE (Costa Rica), with a bachelor’s degree in Forestry from ESALQ/University of São Paulo (Brazil).
Felipe is working towards the TCD graduate certificate and a PhD in Forest Resources and Conservation under direction of Dr. Robert Buschbacher. Felipe is a forester from Brazil interested in forest governance, community forest management, social activism/leadership and rural development in the Amazon and other parts of the neotropics. His PhD research analyzes social innovation and collective action in the Amazonian-nut (Bertholletia excelsa) value chain for promoting biocultural conservation and sustainability in Eastern Amazonia. Felipe has been working for more than 20 years in Brazil and abroad (Australia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico) with organizations such as IUCN, CATIE, Conservation International – Brazil, among others. At UF he has also worked with TCD’s Governance and Infrastructure in the Amazon (GIA) Project, between the southern Amazonas and northern Rondônia states (Purus/Madeira interfluvial region), analyzing the different strategies and tools being used to promote good governance, conservation and development.
Diego Juarez-Sanchez
Ph.D. student in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation; M.Sc. in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation from the University of Florida; Lic. In Biology from the historic Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala (USAC).
Diego is interested in predator-prey interactions, trophic ecology, and invasion ecology. His experience has focused on ecology of predators, especially mammalian carnivores. He has worked as a researcher for Guatemalan agencies, such as the National Organization for the Conservation and the Environment (ONCA) and USAC, among others. As a follow up on his research on neotropical river otters, Diego has expanded to study the guild of predators in riverine systems, including large fish, crocodiles, fishing birds, and river otters. In particular, he examines and how these predators interact with their prey and their environment. In his dissertation, Diego will be evaluating if the diversity of native river predators is a leading driver of invasive fish populations. Local artisanal fisherpersons share the fishing resources with native river predators. This situation can lead to coexistence or conflict depending on the human perceptions of the native predators. By being part of the TCD program, Diego hopes to learn the skills and tools to understand and promote the coexistence of humans and predators in a complex system like the Usumacinta River basin in northern Guatemala.
Sarina Kawall
MDP student in the Sustainable Development Practice program; B.Sc. in Environmental Studies from the University of Guyana.
Sarina is working towards the TCD graduate certificate and a professional Master’s degree in Sustainable Development Practice. Sarina has worked in the development sector for the past eight years, the last four of which have been spent as a project manager for a local consulting firm. She has managed a wide range of developmental projects, both government and donor funded, including field surveys in the social, agricultural, and environmental arenas. One significant example of a project she has led is the development of a REDD+ Grievance and Redress Mechanism under Guyana’s Ministry of Natural Resources. This mechanism formed a key part of Guyana’s preparation for REDD+ implementation. Outside of work, Sarina has volunteered for the North Rupununi District Development Board (NRDDB), the umbrella organization of indigenous communities in the north Rupununi region of Guyana, and in the role of secretary for Eiripan, a not-for-profit Guyanese organization, which supports access to education in hinterland indigenous communities of Guyana. For her bachelor’s degree, she conducted a research project on human-wildlife conflict with a focus on jaguars in an indigenous community of Guyana, under the guidance of the then-country coordinator of Panthera Guyana. Her current research focuses on examining human-wildlife conflict between small carnivores and small livestock in the Rupununi region of Guyana.
Angélica Gouveia Nunes
Ph.D. student in Forest Resources and Conservation in the Department of Forest, Fisheries and Geomatics Sciences; M.Sc. in Ecology at the National Institute for Research in the Amazon, Brazil; Lic. in Biology at the Federal Institute of Amazonas, Manaus, Brazil.
Angélica is working towards the TCD graduate certificate and a PhD in Forest Resources and Conservation under advisement of Dr. Taylor Stein. Angélica is interested in developing research on sustainable tourism development, community-based ecotourism, and natural resource management. During her Master’s, she received grants from Rufford Foundation and PADI foundation to evaluate the impacts of tourism with wild provisioned Amazon River dolphins in the Rio Negro and closely worked with the communities developing this tourism in the planning and regulating the activity. Her Ph.D. research will be developed in the same area, focusing on promoting wildlife conservation in the tourism industry in Manaus. Her professional experiences include teaching in academic and non-academic settings, coordinating research projects, and developing educational campaigns to raise environmental awareness and community outreach for wildlife conservation. Angélica has been part of the TCD community since 2019 when she became a research assistant in TCD’s Governance and Infrastructure in the Amazon (GIA) project and the Amazon Dams International Research Network (ADN/RBA/RIRA). Her research interests involve human dimensions of conservation, community-based natural resources management, tourism sustainability and ecotourism, science communication, and conservation behavior.
Meshach Pierre
M.A. student in Criminology, Law and Society, Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law; Pg.Dip. in International Wildlife Conservation Practice from the University of Oxford; B.S. in Biology from the University of Guyana (Georgetown-Guyana).
Meshach is working towards his TCD graduate certificate and a Master’s degree under advisement of Drs. Jessica Kahler and Matthew Hallett. Meshach has experience working with a variety of ecological and conservation projects in both Guyana and Suriname, especially focused on birds and large mammals. He was the 2014-2015 Panthera Winston Cobb Fellow, under which he studied large mammals in a logging concession with mixed land use. In 2018 he was awarded the Recanati-Kaplan scholarship to attend the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit’s (WildCRU) Postgraduate Diploma at the University of Oxford. There he studied human-black caiman conflict in villages in the Rupununi region of Guyana. Working in the field has taught him the value of indigenous community participation in the success of conservation programs. Meshach’s current research is examining the human dimensions of human-jaguar conflict in the Rupununi, using the interdisciplinary conservation criminology framework, a toolkit that draws from natural resources management, risk science, and criminology. His aim is to understand the factors that affect risk perceptions and tolerance of jaguars, and the potential role that community members may play in preventing jaguar killing.