Johanna Jacobi

Dr. Johanna Jacobi is a senior research scientist at the Centre for Development and Environment (CDE) of the University of Bern, Switzerland. She studied Geography, Biology and Social Anthropology at the University of Freiburg in Germany. Her master thesis investigated agrobiodiversity in peri-urban agriculture in Hyderabad, India, and won the “Fiat Panis” award. For her PhD studies at the University of Bern, she conducted research on the resilience of cocoa farms in Bolivia to climate change. She finished her PhD in 2013 “summa cum laude” and started a post-doc at the University of California, Berkeley, with Prof. Miguel Altieri on agroforestry in Bolivia. Since 2015, she has been living and working in Bolivia, coordinating the regional office of the CDE in La Paz and leading a Swiss r4d project on food system sustainability. Her research focuses on sustainability and resilience in agriculture and food systems, agroecology as science, a practice and a social movement, and power relations in food systems with a focus on political ecology. Dr. Jacobi is a member of the Latin American Scientific Society of Agroecology (SOCLA) and teaches at the University of Bern and the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés in La Paz.