PI: Emilio Kouri, Department of History
Partner Organization: El Colegio de México
The project will provide a state-of-the-art analysis of recent revisionist scholarship on the history of communal land ownership in Mexico. It will also begin the necessary process of formulating alternative explanations for a legal and socio-economic transformation of unquestionable historical importance in Mexico. The collaborators plan to hold a two-day workshop held in Chicago in May of 2025. Ten distinguished Mexican historians will be invited, along with the PI’s graduate students at UChicago. Each participant will be asked to prepare a draft of a paper based on applying a series of questions to their geographic and temporal areas of expertise. These papers will be thoroughly discussed and critiqued over the two days of meetings, and the workshop will aim to close with a clear sense of what changes and additions are needed to get the articles ready for a coherent volume of essays.
PI: Ariel Kalil, Harris School of Public Policy
Partner Organization: Ministry of Economy and Finance, Peru
The project will enhance early childhood education in Peru by equipping PRONOEI educators with essential tools and methodologies for promoting cognitive development and school readiness in children from rural, low-income areas. Chat2Learn, developed by the Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab at the University of Chicago, is a bilingual, text-based program that provides parents with illustrated prompts to foster open-ended conversations and enhance the curiosity and language skills of preschool-age children. The collaborators will initiate a long-term project by first conducting a learning workshop with government officials in Lima, Peru. The workshop will bring together researchers and policymakers from the US and Peru to discuss the policy case and logistics of implementing and evaluating Chat2Learn via an existing government-sponsored program in Peru.
PI: Claudia Brittenham, Department of Art History
Partner Organization: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
The project aims to enhance collaboration and dialogue among US and Mexico-based scholars focusing on Latin American visual and material culture, enriching discussions on the distinctive trajectories of sacred spaces in Latin America and potentially leading to future opportunities for collaboration and presentation in the US and Mexico. This project will convene a three-day conference on the theme of sacred spaces to be hosted at the University of Chicago in September 2024, in which they will bring together an interdisciplinary group of art historians, anthropologists, historians of religion, and other scholars from the United States and Mexico to share their ongoing research. At the conference, discussions will address how landscape features, historical events, architectural interventions, and repeated engagement practices contribute to the materialization and commemoration of sacred spaces.
PI: Adam Chilton, University of Chicago Law School
Partner Organization: Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
The proposed academic workshop aims to unite scholars, officials, and practitioners to exchange insights and foster collaboration and enhance the understanding of informal communities in Chile to generate research that improves public policy both locally and in other Latin American countries facing similar challenges. The PI will host a three-day workshop in Chile during the 2024-2025 academic year to foster research on the causes of the dramatic rise of people living in informal communities in Chile and how their lives can be improved. The workshop would be hosted at one of the research outposts maintained by the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. The collaborators will bring together scholars from Chile and other countries and local authorities to give talks and participate. They also plan to schedule site visits to informal communities.
PI: Luc Anselin, Department of Sociology
Partner Organization: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil
This research project aims to refine property tax assessments by developing advanced econometric models that more accurately define housing submarkets. The PI proposes to develop further a research collaboration between the Center for Spatial Data Science (CSDS) and Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) in Brazil that builds on successful earlier collaborations between Professor Anselin (UChicago) and Associate Professor Amaral (UFMG). Together, the collaborators propose to achieve four goals: 1) The further development of new estimation tools for endogenous spatial regimes to allow for addressing spatial heterogeneity; 2) the implementation of these tools as free and open software as part of spreg, a Python module developed at CSDS downloaded over 700,000 times around the globe; 3) the incorporation of AI-based methods to support researchers with their specification search strategies; and 4) the application of these methods and tools to a research project about housing markets in Brazil.
PI: Raghavendra Mirmira, Department of Endocrinology
Partner Organization: Austral University
This research partnership between the Mirmira lab at UChicago and the Perone lab at Austral University combines their expertise in β-cell hormesis and translational diabetes research to advance the understanding and treatment of diabetes. The PI will expand on the Perone lab’s preliminary studies using the human β-cell line EndoC-βH1 and human islets isolated from deceased donors. They will have access to these models, as well as other relevant technologies (RNA sequencing and bioinformatics), to explore the cellular and molecular mechanisms that enable β-cells to survive the inflammatory environment of T1D and T2D. The hormetic response holds immense potential as a new therapeutic target for enhancing β-cell function and survival. By investigating the specific maintenance and repair processes induced by hormesis in β-cells, the collaborators may uncover new ways to treat or prevent diabetes.
PI: Sonia Hernandez, Department of Surgery
Partner Organization: Instituto Nacional de Perinatologia
Mexico lacks a public health policy based on rigorous scientific studies for maternal overweight and obesity. Given the significant percentage of women in these groups, identifying risk factors and early interventions will enable an impactful public policy. The collaborators are composed of an international and multidisciplinary team of experts in order to tackle a complex problem. They propose to study the effect of environmental maternal exposures (e. gr. weight, metabolic factors, pollution, stress) on the neurodevelopmental trajectories of their offspring. They will follow the cohort Epigenetic Origin of Obesity and Overweight (OBESO) that is already established and has characterized effects up to two years of age. In Mexico, they plan to expand that to three year old children. Their long term goals are to establish a public policy for obesity and overweight management during pregnancy that does not currently exist in Mexico.
PI: Alan Zarychta, Crown Family School of Social Work
Partner Organization: tbd
Health systems are under extreme stress across Latin America. This research will directly inform efforts to develop policies and management strategies for supporting those systems as they respond to and rebuild from the COVID-19 pandemic. To better support efforts at strengthening health systems in Latin America, the proposed project will collect data and establish partnerships with respect to five important cases of health sector governance and reform in the region: Guatemala (political decentralization), Honduras (hybrid decentralization), El Salvador (re-centralization), Nicaragua (centralized), and Colombia (hybrid reform under consideration). The field-based research proposed here builds on and expands the PI’s research agenda in terms of identifying the conditions needed for effective co-production of health services under decentralization reform, and will serve to deepen existing collaborations and establish new ones between the University of Chicago and academics, policymakers, and administrators in Central and South America.
PI: Benjamin Lessing, Department of Political Science
Partner Organization: Fundação Getúlio Vargas
This project aims to develop a novel data-collection methodology to systematically measure and analyze the variations in criminal territorial control in Latin America, leveraging existing scholarly and NGO networks to address the significant gap in reliable data on criminal governance. Trained research associates, each from or residing in a favela community, will submit standardized weekly reports that detail key aspects of local territorial control such as the identity of the controlling armed group, the rules they enforce, their visible presence, and police activities. The reports will also cover any challenges to this control and any shifts in governing authority. During this pilot, the collaborators will collect data from 15 communities over a 10-month period, after which they will evaluate, analyze, and triangulate our findings with other data sources. The results will be presented at an academic symposium in Rio de Janeiro, supported by UChicago and hosted by FGV.
PI: Christopher Blattman, Harris School of Public Policy
Partner Organization(s): New York University; University of Pennsylvania; Universidad EAFIT; Innovations for Poverty Action; Secretariat of Education, Medellin Mayor´s Office, Comfama; Presencia Colombia- Suiza
This project aims to address the pressing issues of crime, education, and poverty in Latin American cities through innovative, data-driven intervention. The collaborators will expand a partnership with the Mayor’s office of Medellin, Colombia along with local universities and non-profit organizations. Over seven years, the collaborators have been collecting data on education, crime, and gangs in the city, developing interventions to address high school dropout, gang involvement, extortion, and drug trafficking. This year, the collaborators will help the city government and non-profit organizations implement and evaluate two large-scale interventions they designed to reduce high school dropout and improve school performance in the city’s lowest-performing schools. They will also help the police implement and evaluate a counter-extortion evaluation they designed. They will support the Alcaldía to improve the quality of their education and security administrative data and analysis. And they will continue building a better information system for the city by conducting the third annual 10,000-person survey on crime, gang, state, and police activities and attitudes.
PI: Tanya Zakrison, Department of Surgery
Partner Organization: Chicago Center for Youth Violence Prevention, Urban Health Initiative
This project leverages a partnership between the University of Chicago and the University of Havana to standardize and improve trauma care in low- and middle-income countries, through the dissemination of an accessible, low-cost trauma training course. The TEAM trauma course from the American College of Surgeons is an accessible, low-cost tool that can be promulgated throughout the Americas, and world, to improve the quality of trauma care globally and lower mortality rates. The PI plans to integrate the injury prevention knowledge of their Violence Recovery Specialists with the expertise of their Cuban colleagues to develop a new TEAM module. Their approach involves: 1) Creating the injury and violence prevention module (TEAM-VP) through collaborative pre-course sessions. 2) Teaching the new TEAM-VP course to Cuban and global medical students, including UChicago student involvement. 3) Evaluating knowledge retention and course satisfaction to enhance future courses. 4) Planning to offer a follow-up TEAM-VP course.
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