BATFN Board of Directors: Maria S. Bowman, University of California, Berkeley Maria is a doctoral student in Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Before coming to California, Maria worked as a program assistant for the Woods Hole Research Center where she worked on developing a model to address one of the primary drivers of deforestation in Brazil: cattle ranching. She also enjoyed preparing for, implementing, and analyzing the data for an economic household survey looking at natural resource usage by farming families in Mozambique. Maria grew up in rural Virginia. She has a master’s degree in Forest Economics and Management from Virginia Tech and a bachelor's degree in Environmental Science from Juniata College (Pennsylvania). Her interest in tropical forests began during an internship with the Yachana Foundation as part of a year of study in Ecuador, and she continued to pursue tropical forest-related issues in her master's work, which focused on the use of fire prevention techniques by farming households in the Brazilian Amazon. She continues to be involved projects that consider the economic drivers of tropical deforestation, and is more generally interested in the economic drivers of land use change at the individual and landscape scales, both in the US and in the tropics. Back to BATFN Board of Directors { About | Facebook Page | Board | Participants | Supporters | Tropical Forest News }