Tuning into the Forest: Stories of Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) in Nature

In this fourth episode, I talked to Andrea Vásquez-Fernández, a Quechua Peruvian PhD candidate, and Vanessa Silva Mascorro, a Mexican MSc alumni, both from the Faculty of Forestry at the University of British Columbia, about their pathways as Latin female scholars in the north.

Andrea Vásquez-Fernández is a Quechua Peruvian PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia. Besides holding a B.Sc. in forest engineering and a specialization on environmental management, quality, and auditing from the National Agrarian University of La Molina (UNALM), she has a M.Sc. from the University of British Columbia. Andrea is a public scholar and part of a pluri-cultural Indigenous research team that conducts collaborative projects. She was invited by Asheninka and Yine community members to form an alliance to address their concerns and desired futures. Currently they are working in a project called ‘RESPECT-AMAZONIA.’

Vanessa Silva Mascorro was born in the beautiful country of Mexico. Here she got her bachelor degree in Information Systems. In 2006, she joined the Mexican Ministry of Forests where she led the National Forests Inventory Database for six years. In 2012, she came to Canada to pursue an MSc in Forestry degree at the UBC Faculty of Forestry, and graduated with honours in 2014. Her research focused on the integration of remote sensing data, forest inventories and ancillary datasets for multi-scale assessment of forest disturbances for carbon accounting modeling. After graduating, she entered into the parenting world while continued working in environmental consulting.

Background music by Guillermo Milla Figueroa.