Christopher Kettle

FTA Management Team Member, Representative for Bioversity International

Christopher Kettle PhD is an ecologist and geneticist. He has 20 years of research experience working in tropical forest landscapes and restoration. He believes that forest bioversity, especially the diversity of trees, offers a critical and underutilized nature-based solution for multiple sustainable development goals, including climate change mitigation, resilient landscape restoration and sustainable food systems. Since August 2017, Christopher has led Bioversity International’s cross-cutting interdisciplinary research team working on the conservation and sustainable use of socioeconomically and ecologically important trees and their genetic diversity. He leads research programs across Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa and the safeguarding forest genetic resources cluster of FTA. He holds a joint appointment and is also group leader in the Department of Environmental System Science, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and an associate scientist in the department of plant science at the University of Oxford, UK. Prior to joining Bioversity International, Christopher was a senior lecturer at ETH Zurich (2007 – present), and supervised over 10 PhD students mostly on topics that inform the conservation and sustainable management of tropical forests. He taught tropical rainforest ecology and led an MSc on resilience of ecological systems. He has a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, UK.