Lorena De La Puente Burlando
Ph.D. Candidate
Institute of the Environment and Sustainability
Lorena is a Peruvian sociologist and Latin-Americanist with expertise in mining governance, particularly mining conflicts, participatory governance, and gender-differentiated impacts in Peru and the Andean Region.
Today, her research focuses on lithium extraction, comparing the cases of Imperial County (California) and Puno (Peru) to inform mining policies for a fair and inclusive energy transition.
Before starting her Ph.D. at IoES, Lorena worked as a Latin American officer for the Natural Resource Governance Institute (2017-2020), and as a part-time professor of Social Science at Universidad del Pacífico (2017-2020).
She obtained her Bachelor’s Degree in Social Science from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (2013) and her Master’s at Oxford University’s Latin American Centre (2016).
Lorena is an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) – Mellon Dissertation Innovation Fellow (2024-2025), a Climate and Community Project Research Fellow (2023-2024), and a Fulbright Grantee (2020-2022).