Dr. Susanna Hecht is a professor in the Urban Planning Program at the UCLA Luskin School. Her research focuses on regional and international development, environmental analysis and policy. She has done extensive work on environmental history, indigenous knowledge systems, the impacts of contemporary development such as soybeans and cattle, as well as alternatives land use systems. Dr. Hecht also works on questions of the "Forest Transition"–that is on the processes of large scale forest recovery in the Latin American tropics. In addition, she is working on climate change, migration, and forest dynamics in Mexico. She has written numerous books, including Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha, which won the 2015 Melville Prize for the best book in Environmental History from the American Historical Association.