Luisa Maffi is an American anthropologist wg is co-founder and Director of Terralingua,^[1] an international NGO devoted to sustaining the biocultural diversity of life - the world’s biological, cultural, and linguistic diversity - through research, education, policy-relevant work, and on-the-ground action. She is a pioneer and leading thinker in the field of biocultural diversity.^[2]

Career

With a background in linguistics, anthropology, and ethnobiology, she has conducted fieldwork in Somalia, Mexico, China and Japan. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from NATO, the US National Science Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, among others. In 1998-2003 she was a Research Associate in the Anthropology Department at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois, and in 1999-2004 a Research Associate in the Anthropology Department at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. In 1997-2000 she held a National Research Service Award fellowship from the US National Institutes of Health. She was a Fellow of the Society for Applied Anthropology (2003–2008) and in 2010 was appointed as an International Fellow of the Explorers Club. Her most recent book, co-authored with Ellen Woodley, is Biocultural Diversity Conservation: A Global Sourcebook (Earthscan, 2010).^[3]