Susanna Hecht

Susanna Hecht is an American Professor with affiliations to UCLA, Luskin School of Public Policy, and Graduate Institute for Development Studies, Geneva. Dr. Hecht was born in Utah, USA, and earned her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley, on soil impacts of forest conversion to pasture in Amazonia. Dr. Hecht has worked in eastern Amazonia on livestock, non-timber forest products and Terra Preta soils and Indigenous knowledge; the expansion of soy in Brazil and Bolivia; clandestine economies in Colombia; and a more general set of studies on Amazonian development, environmental history, and humanized landscapes of the Tropics. She has also worked on the forest transition, the dynamics of tropical urban/rural livelihoods, and the political ecology of tropical land use change, as well as on remittances and forest resurgence in Central America and Mexico.