PPI Student Affiliates

Student Affiliates are promising graduate students and young professionals/practitioners being mentored by a member of the Steering Committee. This category was created in response to PPI's desire to mentor and guide new talent in the fields of ethnoscience.

Selena Ahmed is a doctoral candidate interested in ethnoecology, economics and community health. Her current study compares traditional tea agroforestry systems, wild tea populations and modern tea plantations of Yunnan Province, China along three dimensions: Ii) local ecological knowledge, preferences and management practices of tea stewards, (ii) floristic composition and structure and, (iii) morphological, genetic and secondary metabolite diversity of tea resources. She is particularly interested in understanding the influences of tea connoisseurship, economic and policy pressures on these dimensions and their consequences for biocultural diversity.  She is working with Akha/Hani, Lahu and Yao communities.  This research is supervised by PPI Steering Committee member Dr. Charles Peters, at the New York Botanical Garden; in Yunnan, it is hosted by the Kunming Institute of botany under the mentorship of Professor Chunlin Long.  Her previous ethnoecology research is based in the Argan biosphere of Morocco, the Eastern Himalaya and the Western Ghats of India, the Venezuelan Amazon, Belize and the Dominican Republic.  Her teaching efforts focus on field methods courses with an emphasis on training high school students in the Bronx, New York, on human ecosystem research.

Yvonne Scherrer (Switzerland)  is a doctoral student interested in ethnobotany, processes of knowledge transmission and acquisition, and knowledge pluralism. Her previous research focused on the social aspects of land distribution amidst collaborative forestry management initiatives in walnut forests in Southern Kyrgyzstan. Her  doctoral research, supervised by PPI Steering Committee member Dr. Patricia Shanley, examines the transmission of medicinal plant traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) among German-speaking Swiss medicinal plant experts. Her work seeks to provide a better understanding of the characteristics and nature of TEK in non-indigenous, industrialised societies, as well as the transmission modes of TEK in an environment characterised by a scientific world view, bearing in mind the potential for synergies with related research conducted in non- (or less) industrialised regions, both in temperate and tropical regions.