National Geographic Live: Nalini Nadkarni, PHD “Between Earth And Sky”

When world-renowned forest ecologist Nalini Nadkarni isn’t suspended from a 100-foot tall tree, you would expect to find her in the classroom, working with students—not in prison, working with the incarcerated. Yet that’s exactly where her work has led her.

Always one to look beyond the traditional boundaries of her field, she’s gathered diverse perspectives from dancers, musicians, neuroscientists, traffic engineers, and economists. By unraveling the puzzle of the processes of disturbance and recovery through these diverse intellectual disciplines, she began her most ambitious trans-disciplinary initiative to date, and unknowingly equipped herself with tools of recovery that would become essential to her personal journey.