Ecology and Conservation from the University of East Anglia, and a PhD from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). She was also a visiting student at the University of Cambridge. In her master’s,she assessed the impacts of economic incentives for conservation in traditional communities in the Brazilian Amazon. Complementing her research, she worked as a consultant for the Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security Research Program, and for the University of Michigan, where she investigated the contributions, opportunities and challenges of certification mechanisms in the livestock chain to reduce deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. In her PhD, Helena sought to understand the contribution of area-based measures, such as Protected Areas, to the conservation of biodiversity in the context of the Aichi Goal 11. At CSRio and at the International Institute for Sustainability (IIS) she works in topics related to conservation, change in land use, economic incentives, political ecology and conservation in private areas.