Rate My Professor Jay Mistry

Jay Mistry is Professor of Environmental Geography in the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. She earned her PhD in Physical Geography from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in 1995, with a thesis on fire management in the Brazilian savannas using bioindicators, and a BSc Honours in Biology (Upper Second Class) from King's College London in 1992. Joining Royal Holloway as an Associate Lecturer in 1995, she advanced through the ranks: Lecturer from 1998 to 2006, Senior Lecturer from 2007 to 2013, Reader from 2014, and Professor. She has accumulated over 25 years of teaching experience from undergraduate to doctoral levels and served as Director of the MSc in Practising Sustainable Development, Director of Impact for the Department of Geography, member of the Darwin Expert Committee of the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and Editor of the Geographical Journal from 2017 to 2019. Currently, she is Associate Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society and a member of the Geopolitics, Development, Security and Justice Group.

Professor Mistry's research focuses on environmental management and governance, participatory visual methods including participatory video, Indigenous geographies and rights, biodiversity conservation, sustainable livelihoods, and fire knowledge integration for socially just fire management. Over 25 years, she has led or co-led multidisciplinary projects in South America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Europe, contributing to UN SDGs such as Zero Hunger, Climate Action, and Life on Land. Notable projects include Integrating Traditional Knowledge into Guyana's Conservation Policy (Defra, 2017-2021) and the Leverhulme Centre initiative to advance scientific understanding of fire and sustainable living with it. Her key publications feature "Small-scale livelihood and cultural fire: Global spatiotemporal characteristics, and gaps in data" (PLoS ONE, 2026, with C. Smith et al.), "The Kananaskis Wildfire Charter: a good start" (Nature Communications, 2026, with K. Yadav et al.), "A global expert elicitation on present-day human-fire interactions" (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2025, with C. Smith et al.), and "A global behavioural model of human fire use and management: WHAM! v1.0" (Geoscientific Model Development, 2024, with O. Perkins et al.). In recognition of her two decades of conservation and policy impact research in the Global South, she was awarded the Royal Geographical Society’s Busk Medal in 2015. Her work shapes global wildfire governance discussions and informs fire policy and biodiversity conservation.