Photo Credit Elodie Freymann
Photo Credit Austen Deery
The Explorers Club New England Chapter is pleased to announce a Speaker Series with Dr Elodie Freymann Ph.D, FI‘25 and EC50. We will gather on Monday Nov 3, 2025, 7:00-9:00pm, hosted by the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society in Providence Rhode Island.
Dr Elodie Freymann’s talk, titled "A Look Inside the Shared Medicine Cabinet: Understanding Medicinal Entanglements in the Natural World," will be an overview of her recent work in the field of Zoopharmacognosy. She will explore the diversity of animal medicinal behaviors, discussing the methods needed for investigating these medicinal practices, and illustrate what these scientific investigations look like in the field.
Introduction by a fellow member of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, where Dr Freymann is completing her postdoc. IBES is a program at Brown University addressing the 21st century’s most pressing climate and sustainability challenges through new levels of collaboration and action across disciplines, sectors, and scales of impact.
This event is open to members, guests and the public.
Please sign up below. (This event is person only)
Speaker : Dr Elodie Freymann Ph.D is a naturalist and conservationist, advocating for the protection of our planet’s forest pharmacies. She completed her PhD in Anthropology at the University of Oxford, specialising in botanical self-medication amongst wild chimpanzees in Uganda. She also has field experience working in the Ecuadorian Amazon and Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique.
Elodie is currently working on a two-year animal self-medication project in the Central Peruvian Amazon as part of her Voss postdoctoral position at Brown University. For this project, she is investigating human and non-human medicinal resource overlap in the region and developing a protocol for protecting non-human medicinal knowledge. Throughout her projects, Elodie uses multidisciplinary approaches and methods, including behavioural data coding, animal health monitoring, ethnomedicinal interviews, and pharmacological testing.
She also employs natural historical techniques to document her work, including filmmaking and botanical drawing. Elodie has recently taken on a role as an Ambassador for Fauna & Flora’s Nature Champions Network and is a member of the IUCN Working Group for Chimpanzee Cultures.
We are hosted by the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. This is a program addressing the 21st century’s most pressing climate and sustainability challenges requires new levels of collaboration and action across disciplines, sectors, and scales of impact.
Through solutions-focused research and education enabled by deep partnerships across Brown and beyond, the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society (IBES) aims to be an engine of real-world impact and a training ground for the next generation of changemakers building a just, sustainable world. Backed by a bold five-year strategic plan and grounded in a culture that promotes interdisciplinary collaboration, nimble innovation, public engagement, and equitable outcomes, we seek to bolster knowledge-to-action pathways in Providence, across the nation, and around the world.
This event is held on campus at Brown in the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. There is no immediate parking at locale but there is street parking and university campus parking.
Please plan your timing accordingly and check out links for Campus Parking below.