Antoinette WinklerPrins

Antoinette WinklerPrins, PhD, is the Deputy Division Director of the Division for Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences at the National Science Foundation. She holds a PhD in geography, with a minor in soil science, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Master’s in Urban Planning from the University of Michigan. She was a post-doc at ITC-Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, in Enschede, The Netherlands. She was also a consultant for IPAM-Projecto Várzea in Santarém, Brazil, and has held a visiting scholar position in the Department of Environmental Geography at UNAM-Morélia in Mexico. Before working for the NSF Antoinette directed the ESP, EPC, and GIS programs at JHU for several years. Before that, she was on the faculty of the Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences at Michigan State University where she was also core faculty in the Environmental Sciences and Policy Program, the Center for Advanced Study of International Development, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Center for Gender in Global Context. Antoinette has served as a Regional Councilor for the Association of American Geographers, has been the Chair of the Board of Directors for the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers, and currently serves as a Councilor of the American Geographical Society.

Antoinette’s academic research has focused on environmental knowledge systems, smallholder agriculture, agro-biodiversity, and sustainable livelihoods in urban and rural areas of developing countries. Much of her research has been conducted in the Brazilian Amazon, but she has also been involved in research projects in Kenya, Mexico, and the U.S.A. She has investigated networks of agro-biodiversity maintenance and has looked at how Amazonian Dark Earths (fertile anthropogenic soils) were created in the past, how they may be recreated in the future and their implication for conservation and development for the Amazon region. Supported by a grant from the National Geographic Society, and together with Mexican colleagues, she analyzed changing natural resource use, sustainable management, and the resultant cultural landscapes of Baja California, Mexico. She is the editor of a  book, Global Urban Agriculture, CAB International, 2017, and also of the 2020 edited book (with Kent Mathewson) Forest, Field, and Fallow: Selections by William M. Denevan, Springer: New York.

Antoinette teaches Sustainable Food Systems (420.668.81) at Johns Hopkins every other summer semester, in even years.