Cristina Quintas Soriano

Principal Investigator

Cristina holds a PhD in Applied and Environmental Sciences (University of Almeria 2016) and currently is a Ramón y Cajal Researcher at the University of Almería. She has an environmental science background and has a master’s degree on Global Change monitoring and Assessment. Her research is focused on the analyses of complex social-ecological systems, specifically with an interest on how people relate and interact with nature. She leads different projects under the umbrella’s concept of biocultural diversity, exploring how culture and biodiversity are interlinkages and how cultural dimension can shape and drive sustainability. Additionally, she is interested in the incorporation of gender approaches in science, and is a member of FRACTAL, a collective of women researchers who develops participatory, transdisciplinary and feminist approaches to address sustainability problems.

At academic level, she developed her Ph.D. thesis in collaboration with the Social-Ecological Systems Laboratory at the Autonomous University of Madrid, and at the Centro Andaluz para el Cambio Global - Hermelindo Castro (ENGLOBA) at University of Almería (UAL). She has a wide and extensive international experience as a predoctoral researcher (e.g., visiting researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Center in Sweeden and she was awarded buy a predoctoral fellowship at the Ciudad de Panamá in Panamá). After finishing her Ph.D., she moved to the United States, as a postdoctoral researcher at Idaho State University (2016–18), and later to Germany as a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Social-Ecological Interactions in Agricultural Systems at Kassel University (2018-21). In 2020 she got a Postdoctoral Research Grant of Junta de Andalucía and move to the UAL; later in 2021, she was awarded by a Marie Curie Fellowship at the UAL, where she was the PI of the SCALABLE project on “Social-ecological pathways and gender perspectives for future conservation of biocultural mountain agro-ecosystems” (2021-23) and later she was awarded by an EMERGIA postdoctoral grant where she led the BioDIV project on “Fostering social-ecological resilience to preserve biocultural diversity in rural Spain” (2023-25).

Currently, she is a Ramón y Cajal Researcher and lead a research line focusing on Analysis of social-ecological systems and biocultural diversity. She is the PI of the EmBraCe project on “Evaluating biocultural diversity and social-ecological vulnerability for conserving rural areas in Spain”, funded by the Convocatoria de Generación de Conocimiento 2022. She also serves as an Associate Editor for Ecosystems & People and is an active member of the new Society for Social-Ecological Systems (SocSES).