The Team
Prof. Naomi Millner (Principal Investigator)
Naomi Millner is Professor of Environment and Culture at the University of Bristol and PI of the ERC-funded PEATSENSE project, investigating how carbon imaginaries transform global peatland ecologies in peatlands. Naomi’s wider work explores the social, cultural, and political dimensions of conservation, land governance, and climate mitigation. She is particularly interested in how transnational environmental policies shape landscapes and livelihoods, intersecting with Indigenous and local knowledge systems. Naomi has led several international, interdisciplinary research projects, and questions of how to learn collectively, across disciplines, and across sectors are central to her work.
Dr Erika Teichert (Senior Researcher and Ethics Lead)
I am a Lecturer in Latin American Studies in the School of Modern Languages at the University of Bristol. My research specialises in the intersection between visual culture and activist politics in Latin America. I research and publish on a range of artistic forms and their relation to politics and activism, including photography, film, theatre, art and other forms of visual and material cultures. I am currently collaborating with PEATSENSE as Senior Researcher and Ethics Leads. Focusing on the Patagonia region (Chile and Argentina), I research artistic and cultural representations of peatlands as well as the politics of environmental activism and its cultural production.
Dr Ellie Fox (Senior Research Associate)
My research focuses on how peatlands, glaciers and water are changing amidst extractivism and climate change. I explore interactions between science, policy and law, and am interested in how to study and respond to environmental transformations in a way that challenges existing inequalities and coloniality. I mainly study these issues in Chile, but I have also worked in Peru and the UK. My research sits at the intersection of political ecology, science and technology studies (STS), and critical physical geography. I specialise in interdisciplinary research, integrating ethnographic and participatory methods with physical geography to address socioenvironmental injustices.
Dr Aneurin Merrill-Glover (Senior Research Associate)
I, Dr Aneurin (Nye) Merrill-Glover, am a geographer and environmental historian, receiving my PhD from the University of Manchester in 2023. Since then, I’ve undertaken a six-month fellowship at the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, and immediately before joining the PeatSense team I held a three-year postdoctoral position at the University of Bristol. I’m interested in peatlands, carbon accounting, and peatland carbon accounting. On PeatSense, this means working to understand historical ways of making peatlands profitable, and how they interact with contemporary restoration efforts.
Melissa Felipe Cadillo (Research Associate)
I am a Research Assistant on the PeatSense project and a PhD student in Human Geography at the University of Bristol. My background spans political ecology, biodiversity conservation, and governance in Latin America, with a particular focus on the Amazon. My research explores how different knowledge systems about peatlands — Indigenous, local, and scientific — interact, align, or conflict across scales, and how these dynamics shape their governance.
Giovanni Rodrigues Lopes (Research Associate)
I am a doctoral researcher in Human and Cultural Geography at the University of Bristol. My research lies at the intersection of political ecology, posthumanities, and environmental heritage, focusing on the peatlands of Southern Chile and Patagonia; from the Chiloé Archipelago down to Tierra del Fuego. I am interested in how peatland ecosystems are valued, commodified, and governed across changing and multi-scalar socio-ecological regimes. On PeatSense, I examine the friction between site-specific environmental knowledges and top-down (global and regional) peatland conservation schemes.
Ayleen Martínez-Wong (Research Associate)
Ayleen is a geographer from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and a PhD candidate in Cultural and Historical Geography at the University of Buenos Aires. Her doctoral research examines the written and visual archives associated with women who travelled through and represented Patagonia during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. Within PEATSENSE, she is developing an archive of peatlands in Chilean Patagonia. This work integrates diverse discursive and visual materials, including travel diaries, travel literature, scientific records, photographs, and other archival sources, to examine how peatlands have been represented and transformed over time.
Edna Rincon Villanueva (Research Associate)
Colombian anthropologist from the Universidad de Caldas, with a master’s degree in social and Cultural Studies from Universidad El Bosque and specialized in research with rural and ethnic communities from a social and cultural perspective. I am an associate researcher at the Ecosystems and Climate Change Laboratory at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, bringing an interdisciplinary perspective to territorial and socio-environmental management. For the PeatSense project, I serve as an associate researcher developing a case study on high-mountain peatlands in the region of the Colombian Eastern Cordillera, in the department of Boyacá.