Prof. Nancy Lee Peluso is a leading American rural sociologist, currently the Henry J. Vaux Distinguished Professor of Forest Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1988 and has been at UC Berkeley since 1990. Prof. Peluso's expertise includes political ecology, agrarian and environmental change, forest politics, and land and forest management, with a particular focus on Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia. For more than 35 years, he has conducted in-depth research on smallholders, workers, and land transformation in Indonesia, producing important works such as the book “Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java” (1992). His significant contributions in this field have been recognized through various awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2006) and the Al Moumin Award in Environmental Peacebuilding (2019).