Along with his family, Frantz Alphonse came to the U.S. at age 7 as a refugee from Haiti. This experience has given him a strong sense of empathy underserved communities. Along with eight years as a U.S. Navy hospital corpsman, this experience makes him a great fit for MEDEX.
Category: Americas
Reflecting on an innagural visit to Cuba
Alaska Airlines began the first regular commercial service from the West Coast to Cuba last weekend. President Ana Mari Cauce was part of the delegation that flew to Havana, her birthplace.
Indigenous journeys: Study abroad program explores the Northwest by canoe
The American Indian studies department has created a new study abroad program titled “Tribal Canoe Journey Field Study”, which will give students the opportunity to observe and participate in the annual canoe journeys undertaken by upwards of 6,000 various indigenous peoples of the Salish Sea (Puget Sound) and beyond each year.
Migrations in motion
Together with the Nature Conservancy, UW researchers have released a map showing where animals will need to move to survive as climate change alters habitats.
Law student the first Cuban to attend the UW in half a century
38-year-old David Camps is studying at the UW School of Law as one of three 2015 fellows in the Barer Institute for Law and Global Human Services. Launched in 2012 by retired attorney and UW law alumni Stan Barer, the program pays for attorneys from developing countries to spend an academic year studying issues related to health, education and economic development in their home countries through the university’s Sustainable International Development LL.M. program.
Camps is the first Cuban student enrolled at the UW since the U.S. embargo against the island nation in 1960. In the 2014-15 academic year, there were 94 Cuban students studying in the United States, according to the Institute of International Education. Camps met Barer while serving as a tour guide for a UW learning trip organized by then-provost and now UW President Ana Mari Cauce, a native of Cuba. Barer chatted with Camps as the bus rolled through the streets and discovered he had previously worked as an attorney in Cuba. Barer was struck by his intelligence and resourcefulness, and later encouraged Camps to apply for the fellowship.
Scientists crack the code of butterflies’ international journey
Each fall, monarch butterflies across Canada and the United States turn their orange, black and white-mottled wings toward the Rio Grande and migrate over 2,000 miles to the relative warmth of central Mexico.
This journey, repeated instinctively by generations of monarchs, continues even as monarch numbers haveplummeted due to loss of their sole larval food source — milkweed. But amid this sad news, a research team believes they have cracked the secretof the internal, genetically encoded compass that the monarchs use to determine the direction — southwest — they should fly each fall.
In the Galapagos, UW researchers partner to map historic climate patterns
Together with colleagues from Australian National University, University of Washington oceanographers used clues from the Galapagos Islands — a dot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean — to trace El Niño patterns and seasonal tropical rains over the past 2,000 years. Evidence shows shifts that last for centuries, suggesting these tropical climate patterns have varied more radically and for longer durations than previously believed. The study is published the week of March 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Student research named in El Salvador family’s reunification story
Jackson School students in the 2015 capstone course “Promoting Human Rights and Healing in the Wake of Civil War” made two documentary films aimed to reunite San Salvadoran parents of “disappeared children.” The videos went public in March 2015, and in April, King 5 news covered the story. By early 2016, at least one mother and child from the documentary had been reunited, as documented in this article by the Asociación Pro-Búsqueda. The article references the UW student-produced documentaries.
Unearthing new discoveries at Honduras’ City of the Jaguar
UW researchers Anna Cohen and Rodrigo Solinis-Casparius are part of a bi-national, multi-agency team excavating the City of the Jaguar in Honduras. Artifacts from the site provide clues about life in the lost city, and how it came to an end.
Global Health professor to New York Times: “Zika virus a ‘a temperature-driven eruption'”
Weather and warm temperatures are playing an important role in the spread of Zika virus, says University of Washington professor Kristine Ebi in a recent New York Times article.
Read more from the New York Times…