She holds a PhD in geography from the University of California Berkeley and is a founding member of SOLCHA, the Latin American and Caribbean Society for Environmental History. At the Universidad de los Andes she helped create and, for the last three years, has also directed a master’s program in geography, which emphasizes the relationship between people and their environments from a social science perspective. Her research has focused on both the formation and the present state of peasant societies in rainforest environments, and on the role of racial categorization in shaping Latin American societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.