2003 Lewis A. Tyler Trustees' Fund Award Recipients

Thanks to support from current and former members of the LASPAU Board of Trustees, the Lewis A. Tyler Trustees’ Fund awards up to $800 each to grantees in LASPAU-administered programs whose research encourages the exchange of ideas, staff, or resources between institutions in the United States and Canada and those in Latin America and the Caribbean. Following are the award recipients for 2003 and their funded activities.

OAS grantee Patricia Alvarado received an award for her research into the 1944 and 1952 earthquakes near San Juan and Mendoza in her home country of Argentina. Alvarado hopes that her studies of these devastating yet relatively unexplored earthquakes will help to predict seismic dangers to the region. Her work is part of the Chile Argentina Geophysical Experiment (CHARGE), a collaboration between the Universidad Nacional de San Juan in Argentina, the Argentinean Instituto Nacional de Prevención Sísmica, the Universidad de Chile–Santiago, and the University of Arizona, where Alvarado is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geosciences.

COLCIENCIAS grantee Natalia Hoyos analyzed soil quality data from 90 sites to assess the relationship between erodibility and land use in the coffee-growing region of the Colombian Andes. The impact that coffee field abandonment and conversion to pasture has on soil erosion is a critical environmental issue in Colombia. The University of Florida (UFlorida), the Colombian Centro Nacional de Investigaciones de Café (CENICAFE), the regional environmental institution CARDER, and local planning authorities collaborated on the project. Hoyos is a Ph.D. candidate in geography at UFlorida.

Claudia Navarro, an OAS grantee from Chile, researched the impact of ecotourism/ resource management programs on local communities in the United States in order to develop a proposal for an ecotourism program for Los Lagos, Chile. Her goal is to facilitate the social, economic, and cultural development of South American communities. Navarro’s work is a collaborative venture between the School of Planning and Landscape Architecture at Arizona State University, where she is a master’s candidate in environmental planning, and the Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo Local y Regional at the Universidad de Los Lagos, Chile.

In a collaborative project between the University of Texas at Austin (UT) and the Universidad Católica del Uruguay, Javier Pereira conducted a comparative ethnographic study of the urban poor in Montevideo, Uruguay, and Santiago, Chile. Pereira, an Uruguayan Fulbright grantee pursuing his Ph.D. in sociology at UT, hopes his research will aid in the design of government policies to assist poor families in Latin America’s major cities.

Fulbright grantee Heather Allison Thompson documented the work of seven selftaught sculptors in the English and French islands of the Lesser Antilles, including interviewing the artists and obtaining slides of their work. Her research should be a valuable addition to the documentary resources of her home institution, Barbados Community College, and of Stony Brook University, where Thompson is pursuing a Ph.D. in art history and criticism.

Bernardo Urbani, a Venezuelan Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, conducted a survey of primate populations in northeastern Venezuela. This work is important for assessing the effects of logging, hunting, and habitat disturbance on rainforest ecology and conservation status. Urbani, a Fulbright–OAS Ecology Program grantee, hopes that his research will serve as a baseline for recommendations to the Venezuelan government for ecosystem management policies.