Luisa Maffi facts for kids
Luisa Maffi is an Italian American anthropologist. An anthropologist is a scientist who studies human societies and cultures. Luisa Maffi is a co-founder and leader of an international group called Terralingua. This group works to protect the world's amazing variety of life. This includes all the different plants and animals, the many cultures, and the thousands of languages spoken around the globe. This mix is often called biocultural diversity. Terralingua helps protect this diversity through research, education, and projects on the ground. Luisa Maffi is a key expert in this field.
Education and Early Work
Luisa Maffi studied linguistics at the University of Rome in Italy, earning her first degree. Linguistics is the study of language. Later, she moved to the United States and earned her Ph.D. (a high-level degree) in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley.
After her first degree, she worked on a project to create a grammar and dictionary for the Somali language. This work sparked her interest in how different cultures describe colors. She then went to graduate school at UC Berkeley, where she joined a project studying the Tzeltal Maya people and their knowledge of nature.
Career and Research
Luisa Maffi was born in Rome, Italy, and now lives in British Columbia, Canada. With her background in languages, cultures, and how people interact with nature, she has traveled to many places for her research. She has done fieldwork in Somalia, Mexico, China, and Japan.
Her important research has received support from various groups, including the US National Science Foundation. From 1998 to 2004, she worked as a researcher at major museums in the United States, including the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.. She also received a special fellowship from the US National Institutes of Health to support her studies.
Luisa Maffi was a Fellow of the Society for Applied Anthropology and was named an International Fellow of the Explorers Club in 2010. Today, she is also a professor in the linguistics department at Simon Fraser University.
