Luisa Maffi facts for kids

Luisa Maffi is an Italian American anthropologist. She helped start an organization called Terralingua. This group works to protect all the different kinds of life on Earth. This includes different plants, animals, cultures, and languages. She is a very important person in this field, known as biocultural diversity.

Her Education

Luisa Maffi studied linguistics at the University of Rome. Linguistics is the study of language. Later, she earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. Anthropology is the study of human societies and cultures.

Her Work and Travels

Luisa Maffi was born in Rome, Italy. Today, she lives in British Columbia, Canada.

After her first degree, she worked on a project for the Italian government. This project helped create a grammar and dictionary for the Somali language. She became very interested in how people in Somalia described colors.

She then went to graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. There, she joined a project about the plants and animals used by the Tzeltal Maya people in Mexico.

With her knowledge of languages, cultures, and how people use nature, she has traveled a lot. She has done important research in Somalia, Mexico, China, and Japan. Her work has been supported by many groups, including the US National Science Foundation.

She also worked at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. And she was a researcher at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C..

Today, Luisa Maffi is a professor at Simon Fraser University. She teaches in the linguistics department.