Global Harvard: Latin America

Harvard’s Bill and Barbara Fash have developed a program that trains local people in Copán, Honduras, to preserve and protect the area’s ancient Maya heritage.

A Harvard-backed initiative in Chile aims to reduce economic disparity through an early education health initiative supported by the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Harvard Medical School.

A Harvard student who is interested in a career in archaeology spent her summer on a Peruvian dig, with lots of mundane work and a bright discovery to show for it.

Helping part of coastal Chile to recover completely and prosper following the deadly 2010 earthquake and tsunami is the guiding ethos of Recupera Chile, an initiative based at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies that involves half a dozen Harvard Schools.

Last month, Tim Linden strolled the streets of São Paulo, close to his home and not far from Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies’ Brazil office, where he works as an analyst. He talked about his longstanding connection to the center and his work with underserved children.

For decades, Harvard’s Bill Fash and his wife, Barbara, have worked in Copán, Honduras, to restore, preserve, and protect Maya culture and history for future generations.

Harvard’s Matt Holman, a lecturer on astrophysics, and his collaborators at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado are piggybacking their research onto a NASA spaceship that is racing to the farthest edges of the solar system to study objects in the far-flung Kuiper Belt.

Established in 2006, the São Paulo, Brazil, office of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies acts as a facilitator, connecting Harvard faculty and students with Brazilian collaborators.

GoAmazon2014 is part of the Large Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA), the largest umbrella for research in the Amazon, which explores everything from social issues to scientific inquiries.

Harvard air chemistry expert Scot Martin is working with the Department of Energy, as well as several international partners, to track how pollution above the pristine Amazon rainforest is changing the climate.

Nathan Black, the French Environmental Fellow, is studying how nations fall into civil war during the type of agricultural disruption possible with a changing climate — and what some nations might do to prevent it.

Harvard’s role in an increasingly connected world includes deep ties to Latin America, where faculty and students are engaged in a range of research projects and initiatives, from climate research in Brazil to disaster relief work in Chile to protecting Maya art and architecture in Honduras.