Miguel Alexiades

Miguel Alexiades "has a PhD in Plant Sciences (City University of New York) and was trained as an ethnobotanist at The New York Botanical Garden’s Institute of Economic Botany. He has worked extensively over the past two decades in Amazonian Peru and Bolivia on a number of applied and academic research projects in the fields of health care, human-environment relations, local knowledge and community development. Most of his work and research has focused on the Ese Eja- a small indigenous society living on several tributaries of the Madre de Dios river basin. His doctoral thesis examined Ese Eja health related knowledge and behaviour in the context of social and ecological change. Since 2002 he has been assisting the Ese Eja map and document their history and knowledge regarding their ancestrally occupied lands. He is currently also helping them in a number of negotiations, legal claims and capacity-building processes relating to land and resource rights in these areas. He is currently Steering Committee member of the People and Plants International Initiative (http://159.226.69.10), as well as an Honorary Research Associate at The New York Botanical Garden's Institute of Economic Botany. He has been a recipient of a Nuffield Career Advancement Fellowship (2002-2005) and a Darrell Posey Fellowship for Ethnoecology and Resource Rights (2004 – 2006, http://ise.arts.ubc.ca/DarrellPosey/2004/recipients_en_field.html), both based at the University of Kent. He has also worked as a consultant for Bioresources Ltd of the Earthlife Foundation (1985-1987), helping develop an indigenous ethnobotanical database, and for CIFOR's (Centre for International Forestry) world case comparison of non-timber forest product case studies (2000-2001)."

• Staff, Centre for Biocultural Diversity