Laura is currently an associate professor at the Global Change Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, leading a number of projects including as the co-PI on the Future Ecosystems for African Programme. She is also a researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre where she is involved in work on sustainability transformations and futures, starting a Formas project in 2021 on ‘Seeding transformative futures for people and nature in Africa.’ Having completed her DPhil in Geography at Oxford University in 2012, she undertook post-docs in sustainability science at Harvard’s Kennedy School and under the Bioeconomy chair at the University of Cape Town before moving to Stellenbosch University to research development in the Anthropocene. She has subsequently held roles at the Centre for Food Policy, University of London and as a senior researcher working on the Programme on Climate Smart Livestock in East Africa (PCSL) at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University where she was also the co-PI of the CCAFS scenarios project. She is interested in the interface between traditional knowledge and innovation, the role of futures techniques in transformative change and developing innovative methods for knowledge co-production in developing country contexts. Her work uses the food system to unpack broader challenges and solutions to the complexity of governance for sustainability transformations.
- Affiliations:
- Global Change Institute, University of the Witwatersrand
- Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University
- Core work interests related to Solving FCB: Scenarios and Pathways, Futures, Food Policy, Equity, Transformative change
- Role in Solving FCB: Scenarios and models methods, associated with the West Africa case study – examining whether and how resolving illegal, unregulated and unreported (IUU) fishing in the Gulf of Guinea would enhance the resilience of marine ecosystem services for sustainable livelihoods under climate change
