Advisory Board Member

Meet Noa Kekuewa

Noa Kekuewa Lincoln is an Associate Professor with a focus on Indigenous Crops and Cropping Systems, in the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, and the PI of the Indigenous Cropping Systems Laboratory.  He is the President and founder of Māla Kalu‘ulu Cooperative, a demonstration farm restoring traditional agroforestry methods in the kalu‘ulu breadfruit system of South Kona. He is the production advisor and a board member of the Hawai‘i ʻUlu Producers Cooperative, a farmer-owned business focused on the mid-tier value chain of several indigenous crops, including breadfruit. He is the co-founder and Vice Chair of the community-based organization that owns and operates the Amy BH Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden, which preserves rare native Hawaiian plants as well as traditional crop varieties. He sits on numerous boards of community-based non-profits, such as ʻAina Momona and Ulu Mau Puanui, and governmental advisory boards, such as the Kaulunani Urban and Community Forestry Council.

Noa is kanaka ‘ōiwi (Native Hawaiian) with mixed German, Welsh, Irish, and Japanese heritage.  He received his BS in Environmental Engineering from Yale University, his PhD in Biogeochemistry and Social Ecology from Stanford University, and was a post-doctoral researcher with the Ngai Tahu Research Center at Canterbury University focused on Indigenous Resource Management. Despite his academic training, he credits much of his knowledge and practice to learning from indigenous practitioners, farmers, and other place-based knowledge holders.