Agenda

The JEET Emerging Scientist Award in Ethnobiology is awarded annually to three colleagues who have made outstanding contributions to the field of Ethnobiology and Ethnosciences and are in the early stages of their career.
First introduced in 2025, this unique prize aims to reward and celebrate exceptional early career achievements in the fields of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine. Particularly, the purpose is to recognise scholars who have worked together with local communities and Indigenous Peoples to foster their wellbeing, create inclusion, and mitigate marginalization and stigmatization.
The JEET Emerging Scientist Award in Ethnobiology recognizes exceptional scientific efforts in documenting, culturally analysing, and interpreting local communities' nature knowledge and folk medical practices heritage, especially those of neglected groups. By awarding and encouraging high quality research in this field, the Prize Committee, the JEET and BMC hope that more can be done to revitalize local ecological and medical knowledge systems and turn it into concrete future projects.

Julia Prakofjewa, Postdoctoral Researcher at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, is an exceptional early-career scholar whose work fundamentally reshapes how ethnobiology understands local ecological knowledge (LEK). Her research moves beyond viewing knowledge as place-bound, instead conceptualising it as something that flows, transforms, and is selectively transmitted across time, space, and media.
She has introduced a powerful set of original concepts—including knowledge circulation, hybrid knowledge systems, and "environmental ignorance" - offering widely applicable tools to analyse how knowledge persists, changes, or is excluded. Particularly impactful is her focus on the role of written sources and media as active forces that reshape knowledge systems, as well as on forms of knowledge that remain unrecorded or silenced.
Her work combines strong theoretical innovation with meaningful public engagement. Through initiatives such as the Plantasia educational game and a wide range of workshops and outreach activities, she translates research into accessible, participatory formats that reconnect communities with local knowledge. Her work demonstrates remarkable resilience and scholarly depth. For its originality, societal relevance, and outstanding transdisciplinary reach, the Committee attributed the highest score in the voting process and determined she is a truly deserving recipient of the prize.