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Dr. Rajindra Puri is a senior lecturer in environmental anthropology at the University of Kent. Trained as an ecological anthropologist, over the past 15 years he has been studying the historical ecology of a rainforest valley in Indonesian Borneo, documenting the ethnobiological knowledge of Penan Benalui hunter-gatherers and Kenyah swidden agriculturalists, elucidating the causes and consequences of trade in wildlife and plants, and developing theory and methods for an applied conservation social science. He has served as an ethnobiology consultant to a Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) project examining Multipurpose Landscape Assessment, worked in northern Vietnam (2001) for Flora and Fauna International, and collaborated on Global Diversity Foundation research and training projects in Morocco (Wildlife trade in Southern Morocco), Namibia (Kalahari Garden Project), and Sabah, Malaysia (Ethnobiology of proposed traditional use zones in Crocker Range Park, Participatory approaches to nominating Crocker Range Biosphere Reserve). Most recently, Rajindra and his PhD students have been working on local adaptation to climatic variability (El Niño) and climate change in Sarawak, Sabah and Kalimantan. He is also a co-investigator on the ESPA funded project Human Adaptation to Biodiversity Change, 2010-2011, which took him to the Western Ghats of India for field research in 2011.
During his time at the Rachel Carson Center he was working with the Global Environments Summer Academy.