Gayatri Ganesh

Gayatri has 22 years of professional experience as a qualitative researcher and grant writer in the areas of community development, public health, social welfare, and environmental mitigation. She has worked as a grant writer for grassroots organizations, securing over $5 million in funds from USAID's American Schools and Hospitals Abroad program for projects related to community health, higher education, medical training, and environmental mitigation. For the past six years she has practiced regenerative farming in the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve, Western Ghats, South India, where she lives. She is restoring a degraded one-third parcel of land that was part of a chemical intensive tea plantation. She sells and donates fruit, vegetables, and medicinal plants at the local market as well as planting hundreds of native species. She co-founded the non-profit, Upstream Ecology Foundation, for the ecological restoration of the Nilgiris. She raised $1 million in start up funds from private companies and philanthropic organizations to sustain a one acre native plant nursery and the training of six indigenous people as conservation gardeners, educators, and nursery managers. The non-profit's objectives are to restore and rewild the Nilgiris by propagating and planting native species. Their main activities engaging local communities including, schools, residents, and indigenous communities through planting native species in order to reconnect people with the native ecology. Gayatri completed a B.A (Hons) in Sociology from Lady Shri Ram College for Women, New Delhi in 2001. She then moved to London in 2002 and earned a M.A in Culture, Globalisation and the City from Goldsmiths College, University of London. She worked as a Research Manager at Ipsos Mori's Social Research Institute in London for four years, where she designed and conducted qualitative research with marginalized and vulnerable communities. She worked on policy evaluation and community consultations for various UK government departments in the areas of social welfare, health, education, environmental messaging, and citizenship and identity. In 2008 she returned to India to work as an independent research consultant to grassroots organizations. She has published five peer reviewed research papers, three book chapters, and 25 reports and articles for government departments, journals, and newspapers. A list of her published materials is available on her LinkedIn profile.  At UC Davis she plans to specialize in regenerative agriculture, biodiversity, soil health, carbon cycling and sequestration, and sustainable and equitable food systems that bring communities together to reconnect with nature. Gayatri takes an intersectional approach to her research. She believes that we need to reconnect with the natural world in order to walk lightly on this planet. Gayatri is an avid gardener, budding ecologist, and published nature writer.