Bruno Vander Velde is CIFOR's Senior Writer and Media Liaison. He worked for more than a decade as a journalist, most recently at the Chicago Tribune, where he served as an editor on the foreign desk, and later as the Chief Editor of the city news copy desk. He left journalism in 2010 to pursue a master's degree in environmental policy at Cornell University, where his studies focused on forestry governance in South America. After graduating from Cornell in 2012, he lived in Ecuador for nearly a year, where he consulted for the UN World Food Program and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).