ACA Breaks the 100-Scholarship Mark at Los Amigos

April 22, 2007

ACA’s four year-old grant program for students and researchers working at Los Amigos recently gave its 100th grant. ACA has now given a total of 108 grants at Los Amigos: 36 to Peruvian undergraduates, 36 to graduate students, and the same number again to established researchers. Fully 60% of ACA grant winners to date have been Peruvian, helping drive a nationwide boom in biodiversity training and research.

Last month ACA awarded the first 15 grants in a similar program for Wayqecha Cloud Forest Research Station. To see a list of the winning projects at Wayqecha, click here. The impact of these programs is easy to measure.

This year alone, they will help more than two dozen students from around the world defend undergraduate, master’s and Ph.D. theses based on research done in the Amazon headwaters. Alumni from Los Amigos are now publishing theses and peer-reviewed papers at the rate of more than two per month, on everything from bird morphology to primate behavior to epiphyte distributions

Ensuring that the next generation of tropical scientists has first-hand experience working in the Amazon doesn’t come cheaply.  Over the last three years we’ve invested more than half a million dollars in direct grants to students and researchers.