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FST Welcomes New Academic Staff

The Faculty welcomes Dr. Ina Vandebroek, a renowed ethnobotanist who recently took up the post of Senior Lecturer in the Department of Life Sciences. She will also be working closely with the Natural Products Institute. Her research is in collaboration with Caribbean communities and is centered around the interconnectedness of Caribbean biological and cultural diversity. Dr. Vandebroek’s projects seek to understand patterns of community-based traditional knowledge about the environment and cultural plant use across space and time, using mixed methods such as ethnobotanical surveys, plant taxonomy, and GIS mapping. Currently, she is working on a National Geographic project studying the cultural heritage and plant diversity of Jamaican root tonics, and a Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation grant re-assessing the conservation status of wild cinnamon (Cinnamodendron corticosum), an endemic spice tree that is restricted to Jamaica’s Blue and John Crow Mountains. Dr Vandebroek comes to The UWI from The New York Botanical Garden where she was the Matthew Calbraith Perry Associate Curator of Economic Botany and Caribbean Program Director, Institute of Economic Botany. She also holds adjunct positions with the Yale School of the Environment and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. FST welcomes her!

 

 

 

Published on 16 Dec, 2021

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