I was born in a small town in Germany in March 1968, while my father was doing a Master’s in veterinary medicine. When I was less than two years old, I moved with my parents and two older sisters, back to our home country, Peru.

When I finished high school, I found myself with a big problem: what career did I want to study at the university? I liked many things: literature, law, biology, geography, communications, publicity...the list goes on. The only thing I knew for sure was that I did not want to be a doctor. I was afraid of making the wrong choice. I liked animals very much and I liked to travel; I also always liked very much the nature documentaries on TV. But the people that I saw in those documentaries seemed to me to be from a different world, something unreachable. In those years, I guess, biology, and in particular field biology was not something many Peruvians did. But since I had to make a choice, I decided to study biology, without really knowing what I would end up doing when I finished the five years of courses at the university.

Fortunately I have never regretted my decision, and year after year I had a growing feeling that I was going in the right direction. Suddenly those people in the nature documentaries, and the things they did, started to become less exotic and remote, and became more normal and familiar.