I am ICREA Research Professor at the Department of Humanities, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where I coordinate the Culture, Archaeology and Socio-Ecological Dynamics research group and the newly established UPF Centre for Digital Humanities. I hold a honorary professorship in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa) and I am Scholar-in-Residence, Department of Earth Sciences, IIT Gandhinagar (India). I have been an ICREA at the IMF-CSIC Barcelona, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Archaeology and Director of Studies in Archaeology and Anthropology at St. Edmund's College (University of Cambridge) as well as visiting professor at University of Sheffield, Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (Japan) and J Nehru & Shiv Nadar Universities (India). Over the last twenty years I have been awarded several international grants from the EU and Spanish/Catalan governments, and BBVA, Palarq and Arcadia foundations.

My background is in archaeobotany and environmental archaeology, and I am interested in understanding the socio-ecological dynamics of past human populations in extreme environments such as hyper-humid and arid/semi-arid, from the Mediterranean to the tropics. My interests span from land use, the modelling of processes in human behavioural change, people-plants co-evolutionary dynamics, long term trajectories of biodiversity and sustainability in prehistoric societies, and the origin and resilience of agriculture. A new research avenue that I have been developing over the last few years is related to big-scale recording and protection of archaeological heritage in areas facing increasing threats in South America. My research is developed also through the supervision and collaboration of PhD students (currently eight) and postdoctoral researchers (currently four). I am part of the Doctoral Teaching Board of the PhD Programme in Cultural Heritage at Università del Salento (Italy).