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.