Advisory Board
Led by a Chair and a Co-Chair, it is conformed by members that reflect the interdisciplinary and international approach of SARAS Institute. Its mission is to advice and support on scientific projects, action strategies, funding and operative matters among others. The board gathers in person once a year but it also meets virtually on other occasions. Its members are elected for renewable periods of three years.
Matilda Baraibar
Chair of Advisory Board
Applies an historically informed political economy approach to contemporary agro-food globalization and agrarian change. Her main focus is on the interacting forces of international agro-food trade, technological shifts and institutional arrangements at different levels (global to local), and their differentiated consequences in specific territories. Baraibar teaches and supervises graduate and post-graduate theses in Economic History, International Relations and within the Master Programmes Globalization, Environment and Social Change, Global Political Economy and A new global food order – Global/Local Encounters, Contradictions, Tensions and Conflicts, at Stockholm University. Besides research and teaching, she is the Coordinator of equality and anti-discrimination work at the department of Economic History, Stockholm University. She is also a Municipal Deputy, Deputy of the Municipal Council of Spatial Planning, Deputy of the federal council “the Northern Water Board”, and Member of the Municipal Security Council. Baraibar has previously been working with Swedish development cooperation, as Project Officer at Framtidsjorden. She mainly worked with projects of rural development, urban permaculture and agroforestry in Asia and Latin America.
Cristina Zurbriggen
Advisory Board member
Cristina Zurbriggen is a PhD in Political Science, Eberhard–Karks University, Tubingen, Germany. She is currently a professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of the Republic (Uruguay). She is a member of the National System of Researchers, Level II (since 2009). Previously, she was the Director of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), Uruguay (2009-2012). She has been a Visiting Professor at Mexico, Spain, Ireland, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Canada, England and Germany. Her research has addressed governance, policy networks and sustainable agriculture (meat traceability, soil erosion, water sustainability). Her current main interests focus on innovation Labs, co-creation methodology and other system methods to investigate the future of complex public issues. She is a member of the Co-Creative Capacity Pursuit funded by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), Maryland, USA.
Esteban Jobbágy
Advisory Board member
Graduated as an Agricultural Engineer at the University of Buenos Aires in 1993, as Magister Scientiae in Natural Resources at the same university in 1998 and obtained a Ph.D. in Biology with a specialization in ecology from Duke University, United States, in 2002. Since 2018 he is a CONICET Senior Researcher, with a place of work in the Environmental Studies Group of the National University of San Luis. He also works as Ad-honorem Adjunct Professor at the University of Buenos Aires.
He is a recognized specialist in the interaction between the ecology of terrestrial ecosystems, hydrology and changes in land use, with a focus on the Chaco-Pampas plain and other environmentally similar regions of the world.
He was the founder and currently directs the GEA Laboratory (Grupo de Estudios Ambientales), a reference place in the country for ecohydrological and remote sensing studies, which is not only respected within the scientific community, but also actively develops public communication of science. and interactions with social actors such as agricultural producers and government planners.
He has developed a profuse editorial activity, highlighting his work as General Editor of Austral Ecology, of the Argentine Association of Ecology, member of the editorial bodies of Journal of Arid Environments, Agriculture and Environment, Land Degradation and Development, Agriculture and Bioscience and CABI Agriculture. and Bioscience.
Néstor Mazzeo
Advisory Board member
Has a degree in Biological Sciences and a PhD in Sciences. He teaches at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Ecology of Eastern Region University Centre (CURE) and the School of Science, University of the Republic (UdelaR). He is a researcher of the National Research System and various graduate programmes in Uruguay. At the undergraduate level, he is a professor of the Bachelor of Biological Sciences and Bachelor of Environmental Management programmes (UdelaR). His main lines of research, teaching and extension are related to ecology and restoration of aquatic systems. Since 2006, he has been involved in the development of SARAS Institute together with Marten Scheffer and members of the Scientific Board.
Jesse Kercheval
Advisory Board member
Jesse Lee Kercheval (B.A. Florida State University, MFA University of Iowa) is the Zona Gale Professor of English as well as the Loren and Marjorie Tiefenthaler Bascom Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she is the Director of the Program in Creative Writing. She is a fiction writer, memoirs and poet and the author of fourteen books including the poetry collection Cinema Muto, winner of a Crab Orchard Open Selection Award; The Alice Stories, winner of the Prairie Schooner Fiction Book Prize; and the memoir Space, winner of the Alex Award from the American Library Association. She is also a translator, specializing in Uruguayan poetry, and was a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow. Her translations include The Invisible Bridge: Selected Poems of Circe Maia and Fable of an Inconsolable Man, by Javier Etchevarren. She is the editor of the anthologies and América invertida: An Anthology of Emerging Uruguayan Poets and the SARA anthology Earth, Water and Sky: An Bilingual Anthology of Environmental Poetry which was published in Uruguay in 2016 by SARAS and Editorial Yaugarú and in the U.S. by Diálogos Books.
Henrik Österblom
Advisory Board member
Focus on governance of marine social-ecological systems, including transnational seafood corporations, fisheries and marine ecosystem based management, trophic cascades and seabirds. Österblom is Deputy Science Director at Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, where he is Senior Lecturer in Environmental Sciences. He has a degree in Behaviour Ecology from the Department of Zoology, Uppsala University, and a PhD in Marine Ecology from the Department of Systems Ecology at Stockholm University. He has worked at the Swedish Museum of Natural History and as Special Advisor to the Swedish Government. His post-doctoral research was conducted at the University of British Columbia’s Fisheries Centre, and at the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre at the University of Tasmania, Australia. Österblom is engaged as principal investigator in Nereus – Predicting the Future Oceans Program, and member of the IMBER Human Dimension Working Group. He participates in the Seas of Norden Network, and is co-leading the Baltic Seabird Project. He is subject editor for Ecology and Society, Marine Policy, and PLOS One and has published over 50 scientific papers in peer reviewed journals.
Rafael Calderón Contreras
Advisory Board member
Rafael Holds a MSc. and a PhD from the University of East Anglia and is professor at the Social Sciences Department of the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico City. He has extensive research and consultancy experience in analysis of governance and access to natural resources, with particular interest in the practices and processes that allow social-ecological systems to adapt and withstand the impacts of global social-ecological transformations. Dr. Calderon has lectured on undergraduate and postgraduate level in Mexico and England with an interdisciplinary approach. His main research topics are social-ecological resilience, access to natural resources, analysis of territorial, environmental and climate change policy and Geographic Information Systems. Currently he is working on an array of projects dealing with the role of urban ecosystem services for the resilience of social ecological systems in Mexico and the UK. In 2014 he co-founded the Red de Socioecosistemas y Sustentabilidad (Red SocioEcoS), one of the most active an important research and outreach sustainability networks in Mexico.
Stefan Gelcich
Advisory Board member
He is professor at the Ecology Departmento of the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. His main research lines are the interaction between ecological and social systems in coastal areas, the sustainable conservation and management of marine resources and policy. He has been particularly interested in the social, economic and biological effects of granting exclusive territorial fisheries rights to small-scale artisanal fisher associations. He is currently conducting research on the human dimensions of marine fisheries management and conservation and he is leading a research project on economic valuation of ecosystem services and its implications for decision making in the central coast of Chile and another project studying different marine governance approaches to implement and effectively manage marine protected areas in Chile. He is co-investigator at the CAPES (Center for Applied Ecology and Sustainability) studying links between catch share management practices, biodiversity and environmental attitudes of stakeholders.
Leandro Delgado
Advisory Board member
He holds a PhD in Latin American Literature from Rutgers University (NJ, USA), an MA in Mass Communication from the University of Leicester (UK), and a BA in Communication from the Universidad Católica del Uruguay (UCU). Currently, he is an Associate Professor at UCU, where he directs the PhD program in Communication. Within this program, he leads the research strand ‘Communication and Environmental Issues,’ overseeing projects on data platforms and data governance for climate change mitigation. He also teaches the undergraduate course ‘Ecological Principles for Environmental Sustainability,’ an interdisciplinary seminar co-delivered by faculty from the humanities and the sciences.
In the humanities, his primary research area is ecocriticism in non-fiction literature from the Río de la Plata region. In this field, he has analyzed the chronicles of the Spanish-Paraguayan anarchist writer Rafael Barrett through the lens of Latourian notions of ‘the collective’—focusing particularly on Barrett’s accounts of the Paraguayan jungle. This research contributes to a project to compile and prologue these chronicles for the Clásicos Uruguayos collection of the National Archives. Additionally, he has published on the work of the Jesuit priest José Manuel Pérez Castellano, examining his agricultural manual Observaciones sobre Agricultura (1813) from the perspective of biocoloniality. He has presented his research findings in Argentina, Colombia, and the United States.
An active creative writer, he has published four science fiction and fantasy novels and three short story collections that explore environmental issues, the human/non-human divide, and literary conceptions of nature. He has extensive editorial experience across journalism, literature, and academia, having served as scientific editor and editor-in-chief of Dixit, UCU’s communication journal. He is a Level I member of Uruguay’s National System of Researchers (SNI).