I am a Research Leader in Interdisciplinary Research at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, with a focus on the ethnobotany of Traditional and Indigenous crops and useful plants, agrobiodiversity and resilience. I am especially interested in documenting endangered crop diversity and in situating the use of crops within their local environmental, historical and cultural contexts. Since at Kew, my research has focused in West and East Africa, as well as smaller projects and collaborations in other regions of Africa, Asia and Europe. Currently I am Co-I for the NERC funded project ‘Evolutionary dynamics of vegetative agriculture in the Ethiopian Highlands' (with UCL), and PI for the AHRC project ‘AGRIHIST - Agri-system histories and trajectories: Linking crops, landscapes, and heritage in Ethiopia and Guinea’

 

I am also an archaeologist and archaeobotanist  and worked at the British Museum in the Department of Scientific Research before joining Kew. Initially, as a Leverhulme Resarch Fellow to study the archaeobotany of Amara West - an ancient Egyptian town in Sudan, and later as Principle Investigator for two AHRC grants that combined ethnobotany and archaeobotany to study recent and long term crop changes in northern Sudan. 

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Originally a historian, I am interested in developing interdisciplinary approaches to studying plant uses, and am at home working through archives, being in the field or in the lab.  - I studied history (BA, MA)  at Trinity College Oxford, and art history (post-grad diploma) at the Courtauld Institute of Art, before, a bit later on, my Masters and PhD at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL (2010) - Diversity of plant and land use during the Near Eastern Neolithic, phytolith perspectives from Çatalhöyük