Dr. Ugo D’Ambrosio is a Catalan biologist with over 15 years of academic and professional experience acquired in Barcelona, the USA, Costa Rica, the UK and more recently, Morocco. He holds a PhD in Ethnobiology from the University of Kent (UK) and two Master degrees: one in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology (University of Massachusetts, USA) and the other in Environmental Management and Leadership (University for International Cooperation, Costa Rica).

Working with the Global Diversity Foundation since 2016, Ugo is currently the Scientific and Technical Advisor of GDF’s Mediterranean Programme. He provides guidance in matters relating to ethnobiology and biocultural diversity, agroecology, governance systems, local commercialisation, capacity building and participatory methods. Additionally, Ugo works closely with management and field teams in scaling up strategies, and contributes in grant proposals, project management, partner and donor relations, as well as the academic supervision of graduate students’ fellows.

Ugo was a participant of the Global Environments Summer Academy 2015 in Bern (Switzerland). Following that, he joined the Global Environments Network team as the Mediterranean Regional Coordinator, organising events and overseeing Network member engagement at the regional level. He is a fluent speaker of Spanish, Catalan, English and French and can also communicate in Italian and Portuguese. Ugo is learning Moroccan Arabic intermittently, with a very basic command of the language.

Before joining GDF, Ugo worked in close collaboration with the Botanical Institute of Barcelona and the Botany Laboratory of the School of Pharmacy at the University of Barcelona for his post-doctoral work. This work revolved around the ethnobotany and cultural practices of conservation in both rural and urban environments in the Iberian Peninsula, as well as the interface between food science and culinary arts, with a focus on plants. Ugo has published a variety of peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and grey literature papers.