Professor Gerard Bodeker

The communities of Sarawak have known for generations which leaves heal, which roots sustain, which fermentations mark ceremony, and which mark grievance. Their knowledge is rigorous; it has simply not been studied with the rigour it has always deserved. Professor Gerard Bodeker is the scholar who has spent his career in that gap — and who has chosen to lend his rigour to the conservation work the platform carries.

The institutional ground

Professor Gerard Bodeker holds his doctorate from Harvard and has held two decades of teaching and research at the University of Oxford. He sits at Columbia University as Adjunct Professor. The depth of his scholarship is not a credential the platform recites — it is the discipline he carries into every conversation about indigenous medicine and the cuisine that flows from it.

His standing field is Public Health Sciences, with a sustained career-long focus on traditional and indigenous medicine. He has written, taught, advised governments, and shaped the WHO conversation on traditional medicine for longer than the platform has existed.

That a scholar of his standing has chosen to advise the Serumpun work is not something the platform takes lightly.

What he holds for Serumpun

Professor Bodeker’s scientific advisory to Serumpun is not nominal. His hand sits in three strands of the work:

The medicinal-flora research. The Indigenous Ingredient Codex — midin, empurau, litsea, engkabang, terung asam, bunga kantan, and the others — carries entries that include the medicinal lineages communities have shared. Professor Bodeker’s discipline ensures those entries sit on a clear scientific footing — not as picturesque heritage, but as knowledge that the wider science can read against and build upon.

The Expo 2025 Osaka narration. At the Seaside Studio CASO debut in August 2025, Professor Bodeker narrated each course on stage. The framing was deliberate — culinary anthropology, not theatrical commentary. Where a community’s knowledge sat behind a dish, that knowledge was named. Where an ingredient carried a medicinal lineage, that lineage was placed on an evidence base the room could hold. The international debut earned its institutional weight in part because his presence held it to that standard.

The long conversation. The platform’s medicinal-flora research continues beyond any one chapter. Professor Bodeker’s dialogue with the platform is ongoing — at the rhythm his scholarship asks for, on the ground his scholarship has earned.

Why his presence matters

The cuisine on its own is not a scientific claim. A chef holding a leaf above a plate and saying this heals does not make the leaf medicinal. What makes the medicinal lineage real is the long, careful work of a scholar who has spent his career studying how indigenous knowledge systems hold their evidence — and who can read each entry against the standards the wider science requires.

Without Professor Bodeker, the platform’s medicinal claims would sit on my authority alone. With him, they sit on his.

The communities whose knowledge enters the Codex deserve the second standard, not the first.

The standing arrangement

Professor Bodeker is not a marketing voice for the platform. The platform does not invoke his name to lend authority where authority has not been earned. Where his scholarship has read a claim and held it, the claim stands. Where it has not, the claim waits.

That arrangement is the platform’s discipline, and his.

The long thanks

To Professor Gerard Bodeker — for the years of scholarship, for the patience of his reading, for the choice to lend his rigour to a small platform working on the conservation of a particular forest’s knowledge: the platform’s gratitude is on the public record permanently. The science the cuisine speaks is, in part, your science. The communities whose medicinal knowledge has been entrusted to us know that the work has met a scholar of your standing because they have seen you stand alongside us.

The forest feeds our future. Your scholarship gives the science a public language the future can keep.