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.

Louis Putzel is a doctoral student interested in how global markets affect forest resources and people living in proximity to forests. His dissertation, entitled "The tree that held up the forest: Shihuahuaco and the Chinese timber trade," will describe the structure of Chinese timber supply chains in Peruvian Amazonia and the potential impact of this trade on the regeneration ecology of Dipteryx, a key export species. Antecedents to this project include seven years working in the private sector in China, three years directing conflict resolution programs targeting Africa's natural resource wars, and many activities researching or backstopping people-centered conservation and resource management for NGOs such as PPI and the Rainforest Alliance. Louis' current research has involved living in forest logging camps, traveling aboard timber barges, and visiting numerous sawmills and Amazonian Chinese restaurants in search of market information, seedlings and stories.