About

Born in Indonesia, following her cousin’s footsteps, at the age of 16, Stella embarked on a journey to Singapore to pursue her secondary and junior high school education under the ASEAN scholarship. Drawn to Japanese language, culture, and technological innovation, she later pursued a BSc in agriculture in Japan with the MEXT scholarship. She spent a year studying Japanese at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies before enrolling at Nagoya University in 2013, where all classes were taught in Japanese. To fully experience student life, she took on part-time jobs ranging from tutoring and lab work to making bubble tea. In her free time, she practiced traditional Japanese archery and swordsmanship. Upon graduating in spring 2017, she was awarded the Studeren in Nederland (StuNed) scholarship to pursue an MSc in Organic Agriculture (now Resilient Farming and Food Systems) at Wageningen University, the Netherlands. She then went to Montpellier, France for her internship at Bioversity International (now Alliance Bioversity International – CIAT), contributing to the development of the Agrobiodiversity Index (ABD Index), which aims to increase agrobiodiversity use and conservation across nutrition, agriculture, and genetic resources domains. In 2020 Stella started her PhD journey at Wageningen University to design strip cropping systems in the Netherlands. Currently working on regenerative agriculture as a postdoctoral researcher, she aspires to further produce actionable knowledge on agroecology at the interface of science, practice, and policy.