Dr. Hecht is a specialist on the history and development of the American tropics, especially Amazonia. She is a geographer by training and emphasizes multi-disciplinary methods from the sciences to the humanities in her analytics. She has received numerous prestigious research awards from NASA, NSF, Guggenheim, MacArthur, Pew Charitable Trusts, Fulbright, Hewlett Foundation among many others. She has received The Livingstone Medal for Latin American Research and the Stanley Brunn award for intellectual creativity in research. The author of numerous articles and books, her book "Fate of the Forest, Developers Destroyers and Defenders of the Amazon" is considered a classic ion the field, and her recent book, "Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Eucludes da Cunha," won the Melville Prize for best book in Latin American Environmental History. Dr. Hecht is Professor at UCLA and also at The Graduate Institute in Geneva.