Marianna Fenzi to join LHST for Future Food project
Marianna Fenzi © 2019 Marianna Fenzi
Marianna Fenzi is currently a visiting research scholar at the University of California, Berkeley in the United States. On December 15, she will join the Lab for the History of Science and Technology (LHST), led by Professor Jérôme Baudry, for a three-year research project on agrobiodiversity.
The project, “Interconnected Cropspaces: Antagonism and Complementarity in Conservation and Breeding”, will be supported by a prestigious grant from the Swiss Future Food Initiative.
Fenzi aims to explore current and historical practices related to the use of crop diversity to develop sustainable food systems. Within this framework, she wants to analyze opposition and complementarity between different approaches to crop diversity conservation and breeding.
“There are different scientific communities involved in the conservation and use of agrobiodiversity, and they have divergent approaches. For example, so-called ex situ conservation in gene banks provides a long-term, static conservation of genetic material, while on-farm, in situ conservation aims to enhance plant evolutionary potential in a changing environment,” she explains.
Fenzi believes it is crucial to bring different actors and methodologies together, to offer practical solutions for plant conservation and breeding – especially to farmers. To achieve this, she plans to do theoretical work using tools from the history of science and technology, ecology and anthropology. For fieldwork, she will analyze the scientific practices of three international agricultural research centers: the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico (CIMMYT), the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines (IRRI), and the China National Rice Research Institute (CNRRI).
Ultimately, Fenzi hopes the project will contribute to developing strategies for linking biodiversity conservation with plant breeding in diversified and fair food systems.
“EPFL embraces different scientific communities working on many aspects of biodiversity, and Professor Baudry’s group conducts research on participatory science and the production of knowledge. For these reasons, I believe EPFL is the perfect place to develop my project,” she says.
Marianna Fenzi earned her PhD in the history of science from the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris, France, and focused her thesis on the transformation of approaches to crop diversity conservation from the 1940s to the present. She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the French National Institute for Agricultural Research in Toulouse. For the past eight years, her work has focused specifically on conservation of plant genetic resources. Since 2018, she has been studying the history of biological control and agroecology at UC Berkeley.