Speaker Bios

Albert Ko
Dr. Albert Icksang Ko is the Raj and Indra Nooyi Professor of Public Health at the Yale School of Public Health and a Collaborating Researcher at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Brazilian Ministry of Health. His research centers on the health problems that have emerged as a consequence of rapid urbanization and social inequity. Dr. Ko coordinates a research program in Brazil, which focuses on delineating the role of social marginalization, urban ecology and climate in the emergence of
infectious disease threats in slum communities and informal settlements. He and his team have mobilized research capacity to develop and implement community-based interventions to epidemics of meningitis, leptospirosis, dengue, Zika virus infection and associated birth defects, and the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Marina Silva
Maria Osmarina Marina da Silva Vaz de Lima (born Maria Osmarina da Silva; 8 February 1958), known as Marina Silva, is a Brazilian politician and environmentalist and current Brazil’s Minister of the Environment and Climate Change (since 2023). She is the founder and former spokeswoman for the Sustainability Network (REDE). During her political career, Silva served as a senator of the state of Acre between 1995 and 2011 and Minister of the Environment from 2003 to 2008. She ran for president in 2010, 2014 and 2018.

Alessandra Sampaio

João Biehl
João Biehl is Susan Dod Brown Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Brazil LAB at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. In his ethnographic work, Biehl explores how science and technology move from laboratories to markets, health policies, and unequal lifeworlds in the Global South, with a focus on the pharmaceuticalization of care and the judicialization of the right to health. In his historical anthropological work, Biehl traces nature-based healing practices and the afterlives of anti-colonial insurgencies in southern settler frontiers. Biehl is currently leading a new transdisciplinary and collaborative research project, “Indigenizing Conservation Research and Policy,” which seeks to incorporate Indigenous principles and practices into effective tools for promoting a sustainable Amazon.

Claudia Valeggia
Claudia Valeggia is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies at Yale. Her work is primarily concerned with the interactions between human reproductive biology and the ecological and cultural context in which it develops. Her research program takes a biocultural approach, that is, the interplay between biology and culture takes a central role in interpreting reproductive and other demographic patterns. Her research interests include human reproductive ecology, reproductive endocrinology, maternal and child health, evolutionary demography, biodemography of aging, and health of indigenous populations in Latin America.

Eliane Brum
Eliane Brum (born May 1966, in Ijuí) is a Brazilian journalist, writer and documentarist. In 2019, she was long-listed for a National Book Award and has many other awards and prizes to her credit. She has published several books, both fiction and non-fiction, and has a column in El País Internacional and also writes regularly for The Guardian. In 2017, she moved to Altamira in the Amazon basin and then, a few years ago, she bought a small plot of land with her husband, Jonathan Watts, the environment editor for The Guardian. Alongside others in their small community, the couple are reforesting land that was cleared for cattle pasture.

https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/eliane-brum-banzeiro-okoto/

Caetano Scannavino
Caetano Scannavino is the Coordinator of the Health and Happiness project which he founded with his brother Eugenio, a rural doctor. Its mission is providing 30,000 inhabitants of the Amazon jungle with education, health, and economic services.

David Cordero-Heredia

Daniel Camargos
Daniel Camargos is an investigative reporter with 20 years of experience focusing on conflicts in the Amazon. He won several journalism awards, including the Vladimir Herzog. He was vice president of the Union of Professional Journalists of Minas Gerais and director of the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (Abraji). He has been working as an investigative journalist at Repórter Brasil since 2018 and has worked at Folha de S.Paulo and Minas Gerais newspapers. He has published in international outlets such as The Guardian, BBC, Al Jazeera, Mongabay, and El País, and in several national publications such as Revista Piauí, Estado de S. Paulo and UOL.

Daniela Alarcon

Beto Marubo
Beto Marubo is a prominent Indigenous leader in Brazil and coordinating member of the Union of Indigenous Peoples of the Javari Valley (UNIVAJA). He worked alongside Bruno Pereira, the activist murdered in 2022 when investigating illegal mining and logging with the journalist Dom Philips, to protect the Javari Valley, whose location on the border with Peru and near Colombia has made it especially susceptible to illegal incursions.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/after-two-murders-a-brazilian-indigenous-leader-steps-up-his-fight

Olimpio Guajajara
Mr. Guajajara is the coordinator of the “Guardians of the Forest,” a group of around 100 indigenous activists (among whom 6 have been murdered in the past few years) that defend indigenous lands from illegal miners and loggers.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2022/09/29/olimpio-guajajara-guardian-of-the-amazon-rainforest-with-lula-dialogue-will-be-possible_5998498_4.html

Glenn Shepard
Dr. Glenn Shepard, is an ethnobotanist and medical anthropologist who has worked with indigenous people in the Amazon. He is currently the ethnology curator at the Goeldi Museum in Belém do Pará, Brazil.