I am a Chilean researcher trained in Clinical Psychology and Medical Anthropology, with long-standing experience working in Indigenous territories and in the study of how public policies —particularly in mental health and energy— intersect with community transformations in Chile. I currently hold the position of Associate Professor in Anthropology, Socioecological Transitions, and Territorial Transformations at the University of Amsterdam.

My interdisciplinary work brings together clinical psychology, social anthropology, and science and technology studies (STS) to explore how geopolitical tensions, climate crises, and sociomaterial dynamics transform people's ways of living and thinking. While my methods are ethnographic and my frameworks interdisciplinary, my work remains grounded in sustained dialogues with clinical and community psychology, especially in contexts marked by systemic inequality, extractivism, and intercultural conflict. I have developed long-standing collaborations with communities, institutions, and researchers in Chile, which continue to shape my intellectual commitments and methodological approach.

My academic training began in Chile, where I obtained a degree in Clinical Psychology at Pontificia Universidad Católica (1999). I later specialized in Systemic Family Therapy in Italy (Milan School, 2006), where I also directed experimental projects in public mental health and street psychiatry in collaboration with the WHO between 2002 and 2007. In 2012, I completed a PhD in Social and Medical Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, focusing on intercultural communication in public mental health services in southern Chile.

Between 2012 and 2016, I held a postdoctoral position at the University of Amsterdam under the supervision of Annemarie Mol, as part of the Health, Care and the Body group. During this time, I explored how infrastructures are deeply entangled with the circulation of food and how these material arrangements participate in shaping bodies, health notions, and everyday forms of care in contemporary societies (more information here). From 2017 to 2019, I was a Marie Curie Global Fellow, leading the Invisible Waters project at the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, which collaborates with UNESCO. This project analyzed practices for making aquifers visible in the Atacama Desert, the driest desert in the world (more information here).

I have led international projects such as the ERC Worlds of Lithium, which investigates the social and material impacts of lithium extraction in Chile, lithium battery production and the use of electric vehicles in China, and battery recycling in Norway (official website). 

My work aims to build bridges between divergent knowledges and practices —including those of natural sciences, environmental activism, and local communities— to craft more equitable and sustainable responses to planetary challenges.

Currently, I lead the ERC project titled Worlds of Lithium (WOL), which investigates the societal impacts of lithium extraction and lithium-ion batteries in global energy transition efforts. Through empirical studies in Chile, China, and Norway, my research sheds light on our interdependence and co-constitution with these materials and technologies, exploring their transformative implications within the complexities of modern life in times of climate change.

Worlds of Lithium builds upon my previous research, Invisible Waters, supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie EU programme. This project focused on groundwater practices in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, the driest desert in the world, highlighting the urgency of ecologically studying and rethinking what decarbonisation strategies entail.

Postgraduate level

• The Politics of Sustainability: Environments, Cultures, Materials /  Multispecies ecologies and Planetary Matter

Undergraduate level

• Environments, Alterities and the Anthropological Imagination / Practicing Etnography / Ethnographies and academic writing

I am also Supervisor at the Master on Cultural and Social Anthropology, at the  Research Master's in Social Sciences, at the  Master in International Development Studies and at the Master in Medical Anthropology and Sociology