I was born in the south of Chile, surrounded by the Andes, deep green forests and fast-flowing rivers. Most of my holidays were spent camping and at my family's farm even further south, where I fell in love with trees. I've spent almost every free day I have outdoors, hiking up and across mountains and forests in the south of Chile and Patagonia. That is how I ended up volunteering for Tompkins Conservation at the Patagonia Park in 2013 and kept volunteering for them ever since, increasing my interest in conservation. 

 

I did my undergraduate in Industrial Engineering, always focused on sustainability issues and did my thesis designing a new solar thermal collector. Even though I never planned for it, I ended up being an entrepreneur with an amazing group of partners, creating and managing the projects of Ecoenergias, a solar photovoltaics engineering company. It didn't end there since I also created Borg, a company that recently patented a new organic electrolyte for an organic redox flow battery and Tierra Firme, a renewable energy development company. In this process, we won 10 grants worth almost 1 million AUD. 

 

I decided I want to work closer to conservation, so I took the opportunity to come do a masters in Conservation and Natural Resource Management at UQ with a scholarship from the Chilean government. Here, I am looking at the spatial distribution of conflicts among various renewable energy technologies and conservation priorities. I'm also working as a Research Assistant for the Rapid Switch project, trying to understand the speed of change towards a zero-emissions world. 

 

In parallel, I work with Preserve in Community, an organization that has created a platform to support conservation projects and I love teaching, I've done 13 tutorings in Chile and I'm currently tutoring in Australia too.