Latin America

A total of 20 projects won Global Incubator Seed Grants this month, allowing them to kickstart new research examining a whole host of issues, from the cyber defense of medical devices to the impacts of affordable housing on physical activity and health in Brazil.

Rodrigo Siqueira Reis was running in a park in Curitiba, Brazil, on a weekend morning when he realized he had spent years approaching health backward. Around him, people were playing pickup soccer, jogging, and walking. They were simply living in a space that made movement natural, joyful, and free.

More than 20 years ago, Jonathan Losos was in the Bahamas pursuing one of his favorite pastimes — catching and measuring anole lizards — when he spotted a familiar reptilian flash on a branch. A chance encounter by him inspired a team of biologists to study lizards with missing or reduced limbs.

For the first time, the Prevention Research Center (PRC) at Washington University in St. Louis has taken its signature Evidence-Based Public Health training program (EBPH) to a U.S. territory. This summer, the EBPH faculty delivered the course over three and half days in Caguas, Puerto Rico. 

A team of WashU researchers and engineers has won a $3.9 million grant from the National Science Foundation to build and install gamma-ray cameras for the Small-Sized Telescopes of the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO), the smallest of the three classes of telescopes the observatory will deploy. The telescopes are planned for the observatory’s Southern Hemisphere site in Paranal, Chile.

To Lora Iannotti, MA, PhD, an expert on global maternal and child nutrition, the images of famine coming out of Gaza these days are heartbreaking and appalling. She knows more than most what the consequences of famine can be. 

Bronwen Konecky has won a prestigious NSF CAREER Award to study rainfall changes in the Central America and northern South America region

Near a remote beach on the coastline of Nicaragua, about 12 kilometers from the border of Costa Rica, Edya Kalev, AB ’92, guides a group of women as they each apply gentle, purposeful pressure to their hands, feet and spine.

Benjamin Garcia, PhD, the Raymond H. Wittcoff Distinguished Professor and head of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, has been selected as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar for the 2025-2026 academic year.

WashU grad student working to conserve endangered reptiles, amphibians in Honduras