Martin Hitziger

I am environmental scientist and management scientist. An initial year of exchange studies at ETH acquainted me with transdisciplinarity, collaborative approaches, and integration or synthesis. Later, I did my PhD at TdLab (2012-2016). Together with my colleague, Dr. Berger-Gonzalez, we initiated and coordinated one of the first major intercultural transdisciplinary research and development platforms, focused on traditional and public health. It included five Mayan linguistic groups, as well as the national cancer hospital, and other medical and scientific stakeholders in Guatemala. Apart from my role as co-coordinator, I facilitated the largest published ethnobotanical specimen collection in the country. We also developed patient centered approaches to facilitate intercultural medical collaboration between traditional and western medical systems. This work is currently nominated for an award of excellence in integrative medicine.

Integration of knowledge was also at the core of my PostDoc at University of Zurich. Within the network for the evaluation of One Health (partly in collaboration with the TdLab), I was able to bridge my own experiential knowledge as project leader with existing thought on evaluating multi-stakeholder initiatives in sustainability and health. The main outcome was a novel conceptualisation of knowledge integration in policy cycles, cast into a comprehensive evaluation framework for such initiatives.

The Guatemalan project has, furthermore, inspired further field research, funded by several grants from SNF and relevant foundations. Apart from ongoing R4D efforts in the field of One Health (assembled and coordinated by my former colleague, now at Swiss TPH Basel), I was key in building a consortium and submitting a successful project application on inclusive health under the auspices of University of Zurich. This consortium consists of several national ministries and multiple stakeholders in Switzerland, Guatemala and Peru, and I will contribute to oversee its implementation.

My ethnobotanical expertise and Latin American experience has, finally, brought me into contact with the United Nations, where I currently act as plant species officer (JPO) in the secretariat of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. I am looking forward to continue working at the interfaces of health and sustainability, research and policy, and between species conservation and international development.