José is a Forest Engineer from the University of Chile. He has collaborated with Indigenous communities in Chile and Canada regarding sustainable forest management. Before he came to Canada he was a research assistant in the Forest Research Institute of Chile (INFOR), where he worked with rural communities in a Project related to Honey Production in northern Chile.
José completed his M.Sc. in forestry at UBC Faculty of Forestry under the supervision of Dr. John L. Innes. Working with Dr. Innes, Jose was part of the Sustainable Forest Management Research Group (SFMRG) and his research focused on climate change, Indigenous knowledge, and forest management in collaboration with the Nisga’a Nation (Northwestern British Columbia, Canada).
Currently, he is a Ph.D. candidate in the UBC Faculty of Forestry, a UBC Public Scholar at the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, and a Liu Scholar at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, an interdisciplinary research hub for emerging global issues in the Faculty of Arts at UBC. The focus of his research is placed on Indigenous communities from Chile, with a particular interest in the struggles of Mapuche communities. For this reason, at the Liu, he was part of the Latin America and the Global Working Group. Through this group, he collaborated in the organization of ‘People of the Land: Dialogue series with the Mapuche Territorial Alliance’, held at UBC (Vancouver) in September 2015.
In addition to his studies, José volunteers at Redicec, a Network of Chile-Canada Research. Here, he is the former Director of Planning and Strategy (2018-2020). He also represents Redicec at the Retribution Commission of Redes Chilenas (ReCh), which is working on a proposal of Flexible Retribution for Becas Chile. Previously, he was the Finance Director (2016-2018). During this period the cycle of Webinars Redicec-Chile Global began, in which José collborated as IT support and moderator.