Maria J. Santos

Maria J. Santos is an Associate Professor in Earth System Science at the Department of Geography at the University of Zurich with a research focus on the co-evolution of social-ecological systems, through their interdependence on biodiversity and ecosystem services as to inform sustainability pathways. She uses a variety of methods from field surveys to Earth Observation/Remote Sensing as well as statistical and process-based models to understand coupled interactions in social-ecological systems. Together with her team, they study social-ecological interactions at local to global scale as well as across scales of time. She is also the Co-director of the University Research Priority Program in Global Change and Biodiversity. She received her PhD in Ecology from the University of California Davis in 2010. Before she was appointed at UZH in 2018, she was an Assistant Professor at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University, in the Netherlands and a Research affiliate with the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University. Her memberships include the Forum Biodiversitaet Kuratorium of the Swiss Academy of Sciences, the Scientific Advisory Board to the OECD Co-operative Research Programme in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems, and the International Union for Nature Conservation Species Survival Commission Climate Change Specialist Group. Currently she is a leading author in the IPBES Nexus Assessment.