Dr. María del Pilar Ramírez Gröbli is a senior researcher at the Walter Benjamin Kolleg at the University of Bern and has established the research platform "About Long-term effects of industrial palm oil production."
She is currently president of the Asociacion Colombiana de Investigadores en Suiza (ACIS) and a teacher of Spanish at the Freie Schule Zürich. She has worked as a researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Bern. She completed her doctoral studies at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, where she also worked as an assistant at the Institute for Spanish Language and Literature from 2010 to 2014. In 2007, she completed her licentiate in Spanish and Political Science at the University of Zurich. In 1999, she earned a master's degree in international relations from the Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, and in 1994, she completed her studies in Spanish and English literature at the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional de Bogotá.
She is currently a member of the Environmental Mobility Research Unit (EMRU) and the editorial board of the journal Alternautas. She is part of the research group for the Colombian-Swiss cooperation project “Designing a framework for regional eco-social transitions: A river-centered approach.”
Her most recently published books are Soundscapes of Return. Oil palm, dispossession, and cultures of peace in post-conflict Colombia (2020) and ACIS 30 años: Diáspora científica colombiana en Suiza. Una experiencia pionera en el mundo (2022), both of which were published in Spanish. In 2022, she led the research project “Local voices in the palm oil boom” and produced two short films: one in Kalimantan, Indonesia, and the other in the Orinoquia region of Colombia.
