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Jana Fortier is a Himalayan specialist at the University of California, San Diego since 2007 in the Department of Anthropology and in the School of Global Policy and Strategy where she teaches courses on sustainability issues and heritage preservation. Her expertise centers around the resilience of communities facing threats to their language and culture. This work has resulted in numerous articles and two books. The book 'Kings of the Forest: The cultural resilience of Himalayan hunter-gatherers’ (U. of Hawai’i Press) portrays the life of highly endangered hunter-gatherers; and ‘A Comparative Dictionary of Raute and Rawat’ (Harvard Univ. Press) documents their Sino-Tibetan languages. Her research has been funded by numerous agencies including the Wenner-Gren Foundation in 1989, 1996, and 2000; the National Endowment for the Arts in 2004; the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2001, and the Fulbright Foundation in 1990, 2004, and 2015. She received her doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Anthropology with a concentration in South Asian Studies and has spent several years in Nepal and India on various research trips. Now located in San Diego, she also advises government agencies such as the City of San Diego, the Department of the Navy, and the California Dept. of Transportation on public folk arts, sustainable development of local cultures, and preserving traditional cultural properties. She is currently working on an book concerning environmental knowledge and practices among indigenous communities.