Laura Pereira is currently a Research Fellow at the Centre for Food Policy, working on governance for food system transformation in South Africa. Having completed her DPhil in Geography at Oxford University in 2012, she undertook post-docs in sustainability science at Harvard’s Kennedy School and under the Bioeconomy chair at the University of Cape Town, before moving to Stellenbosch University to research development investments in the Anthropocene. She is interested in the interface between traditional knowledge and innovation, the role of futures techniques in transformative change and developing innovative methods for knowledge co-production in developing country contexts. Her work uses the food system to unpack broader challenges and solutions to the complexity of governance for sustainability. As well as her focus on food systems research, Pereira was a co-ordinating lead author for UN Environment’s GEO-6, a lead author for the IPBES Regional Assessment for Africa, and is contributing to the Africa chapter of the IPCC’s 6th assessment report. She also sits on the IPBES expert group on scenarios and models. Pereira has an extraordinary appointment at the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition at Stellenbosch University, and an honorary affiliation in the School of Life Sciences at the University of KwaZulu Natal. She is also a research associate at the Stockholm Resilience Centre and a senior researcher at Utrecht University, working on an ILRI project on livestock systems under climate change in East Africa.