Curriculum Vitae

Gonzalo Cortés-Capano joined the group of Social-Ecological Interactions in Agricultural Systems in September 2024 when he started working as an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow. He holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Environmental Sciences, Department of Geosciences and Geography, University of Helsinki, Finland. His dissertation, defended in 2021, focused on identifying adequate policies to support voluntary conservation and environmental stewardship according to people’s needs and their main relations with nature in traditional cattle ranging landscapes.

As a postdoc, he first worked for the ERC-funded project WILDTRADE at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and then joined the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, as a Postdoctoral Fellow in sustainability science at the School of Resource Wisdom. During the three years of the Fellowship, his work focused on conducting research on the philosophical underpinnings of transformative biodiversity conservation, including ethical pluralism and the role of sensemaking and abductive reasoning. He also contributed to the collaborative effort to develop the concept of planetary well-being and actively participated in different research projects and public events. During his fellowship he was the responsible teacher of the course “Ethics of Global Responsibility” focusing on the nature of collective ethical problems such as inequality, climate change and biodiversity loss.

His academic background includes a BSc and a MSc in Biological Sciences specialising in Ecology and Evolution from the University of the Republic, Uruguay. In addition, he worked as a practitioner for over 5 years, integrating interdisciplinary teams collaborating with stakeholders to design and implement on-the-ground conservation initiatives, ranging from a national voluntary conservation program, to municipal and national protected areas in Uruguay.

Research Foci
His broad research interests include understanding the relations between people and nature and their connection with space and place, social practices, environmental ethics and justice and how they shape rural landscapes. As a Humboldt Fellow at the SEI-Group, he is currently studying the relations between agroecology, pastoralism and biodiversity conservation to identify synergies and tensions to enable transformative change in rural landscapes in Europe.

Publications
Publications and further information are available on Google Scholar, Researchgate, Bluesky, and X.