Robin Kimmerer

Alum 2005 | Alum 2008

Robin Wall Kimmerer, PhD, is a mother, plant ecologist, writer, and SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York. She serves as the founding director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment whose mission is to create programs which draw on the wisdom of both indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability.

Robin has taught courses in botany, ecology, ethnobotany, indigenous environmental issues, as well as a seminar in application of traditional ecological knowledge to conservation.

She is the co-founder and past president of the Traditional Ecological Knowledge section of the Ecological Society of America. Robin serves as a Senior Fellow for the Center for Nature and Humans. Of European and Anishinaabe ancestry, Robin is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.

Her essays appear in Whole Terrain, Adirondack Life, Orion and several anthologies. She is the author of Gathering Moss, which incorporates both traditional indigenous knowledge and scientific perspectives and was awarded the prestigious John Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing in 2005. Her book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants was released in 2013 and was awarded the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. She has served as writer in residence at the Andrews Experimental Forest, Blue Mountain Center, and the Sitka Center—as wells the the Mesa Refuge.

She holds a BS in Botany from SUNY ESF and an MS and PhD in Botany from the University of Wisconsin. She lives on an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens both cultivated and wild.