Rosimeiry Portela

Rosimeiry Portela, who is participating as a mentor to the Population Fellows at the 2002 Compton Foundation workshop, is from Brazil. She is currently a doctoral student at the Marine Estuarine Environmental Sciences Program MEES Program at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on the losses of the ecological functions and services provided by the forest due to current patterns of land uses in the Brazilian Amazon. She is also interested in investigating land use alternatives that are more sustainable over the long term, identifying a set of incentives that, if put in place, could foster such uses, and prevent further deforestation. As a graduate research assistant, Rosimeiry has been working at the Institute for Ecological Economics IEE with modeling techniques, integrating information about ecological, economic, and social issues. As a PRB Population Policy Communication Fellow from 2001-2, she conducted and presented research on "Ecosystem services from Brazil's Amazon rainforest: Framework for incentives, mechanisms and institutions for their continued provision." She has a Masters degree in systems ecology at the University of Florida, where she was as a recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship for the duration of her program. Rosimeiry has extensive experience with implementation of large scale-project in the State of Mato Grosso, Brazil, where she worked before going to graduate school. From 1994 to 1996, she was in charge of the environmental component of the Mato Grosso Natural Resource Management Project - PRODEAGRO, a World Bank loan, coordinating the technical, physical and financial planning and implementation of projects in the environmental field.