Ina Vandebroek

ethnobotanist working in the areas of floristics, ethnobotany and community health. Since 2005, she has worked at the New York Botanical Garden in the Institute of Economic Botany. She has worked on ethnobotanical projects in North America, the Caribbean, and South America

ethopharmacology and intra-cerebral microdialysis".^[2]

ethnobotanical research was conducted in a traditional farming community in the Andes and in indigenous communities in the Amazon in Bolivia." She summarized the results as follows. "The results demonstrated that knowledge held by traditional healers about medicinal plants can also be high in an environment such as the Andes that is significantly affected by human activity and is less diverse as compared to the tropical rainforest. In the Amazon, knowledge about medicinal plants was inversely related to the use of pharmaceutical products and to distance from Western primary healthcare services."^[2] Outreach activities associated with this research project included two community guidebooks in Spanish that were developed to return research results to the communities to help preserve their cultural heritage.^[3][4]

The New York Botanical Garden as a postdoctoral research associate in the Institute of Economic Botany. From 2005 until 2010 she worked on projects related to the Dominican Republic. Most notably, she directed "Dominican Ethnomedicine and Culturally Effective Health Care in New York City" (principal investigator: Michael Balick) and "Dominican Traditional Medicine for Urban Community Health". These projects focused on the question of what happens to the medicinal plant knowledge that people from the Dominican Republic have once they move to New York City. The research found that medicinal plant knowledge was not lost by this community after migration;^[5] in fact, the importance of food as medicine became even greater within this relocated population.^[2] Vandebroek drew upon her research during this time for her 2007 book, Traveling Cultures and Plants: The Ethnobiology and Ethnopharmacy of Human Migrations, which she co-edited with Andrea Pieroni and authored chapters with others.^[6]

Ethnomedical Research Specialist at the New York Botanical Garden. She directed "Improving Healthcare for Underserved Immigrant Latino

Matthew Calbraith Perry Assistant Curator of Economic Botany and Caribbean Program Director at the New York Botanical Garden. In this capacity, she directs the Caribbean and Latino Ethnomedicine Program, which investigates and compares the use of medicinal plants for healthcare by Latino and Caribbean communities living in New York City and their countries of origin. Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Jamaicans are the central populations involved in these research studies. She and her team study wild and cultivated plants that are used culturally as medicines and foods, as well as "folk illnesses," and how they are related to mainstream biomedicine, in terms of the biological efficacy and safety of these plants, and the gap in biomedical knowledge about illnesses with a strong cultural component. The project aims to use research results in order to develop materials used for medical education

The Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic's The Plate and The New York Times.^{[7][8][9][10][11][12]}

The Graduate Center, CUNY).^[13][14]