Vanessa Valdez

Vanessa Valdez currently teaches High School and Middle School science blocks, as well as Spanish. Born in Mexico City, she has a bachelor’s in biology from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM in Spanish), with an Honors degree in Rainforest Ethnobiology. After working for a year in the Mexican Fund for the Conservation of Nature (FMCN), Vanessa left for Townsville, Australia where she undertook a Masters in Science focused on Protected Area Management at James Cook University (JCU). When she finished this degree, the Centre for Tropical Biodiversity and Climate Change (CTBCC) at JCU offered her a scholarship to work on her PhD studying the productivity of tropical forests under climate change. After her postgraduate studies, she returned to Mexico to help create the Climate Change Project division within the FMCN, where she led conservation efforts aimed at reducing CO2 emissions nationwide. In 2018, she started studying Anthroposophy and began teaching middle school biology at the Colegio Inlakesh, a Waldorf school in the southwestern side of Mexico City. In 2020, Vanessa moved to Valle de Bravo, where she continued to teach middle school at the local Waldorf School Los Caracoles. In 2022, she finished her Waldorf High School Teacher certificate from the Center for Anthroposophy and moved with her family to Upstate New York. Since then, Vanessa, her husband, and two kids have been delighted to be part of the Hawthorne Valley community.