Aili Pyhälä (PhD in Development Studies, 2003, University of East Anglia) is a Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the University of Helsinki. After years of working and living with indigenous peoples in Amazonia and Africa and gaining direct experience working with local communities, participatory processes, and social and environmental justice, she now pursues her research interests in indigenous peoples’ knowledge and rights, alternative education, conservation psychology, global responsibility, human-nature relations, and cross-cultural notions of wellbeing. She has researched and worked with a number of sustainability and wellbeing indicators, and has close to 20 years of experience evaluating development cooperation projects worldwide. A trained permaculturist, fluent in 8 languages, and with professional experience in 25 countries, she enjoys teaching, facilitating events, and promoting cross-cultural communication and exchange. Victoria Reyes-García (PhD in Anthropology, 2001, U. of Florida) is ICREA Research Professor at the Environmental Science and Technology Institute, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her research addresses the benefits generated by local ecological knowledge and the drivers of change of this type of knowledge. Reyes-García has worked in international research projects since 1996. She lived among the Tsimane', a hunter-gatherer society in the Amazon, from 1999 until 2004. She has experience in multidisciplinary research, working with anthropologists, agronomists, biologists, economists, archaeologists, and computer scientists. Since April 2006 she coordinates the Ethnoecology Laboratory, which catalyses projects studying the dynamic relations among people, biota, and environments. She has more than 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals. In 2010 she received a Starting Grant from the European Research Council to study the adaptive nature of local ecological knowledge using a cross-cultural comparative approach.
