Students Find Connections, Community in Peru’s Sacred Valley

For Duke student Olaya Garcia-Grau, one of the highlights of spending eight weeks this summer in Peru’s Sacred Valley was participating in the Danza de los Panaderos (Dance of the Bakers). “It’s a very traditional dance and we wore the traditional dance clothing,” said Garcia-Grau, a rising junior majoring in neuroscience and chemistry and minoring in global health. “It was a great way to interact with the community.” 

For Aaron Andino and Dhruv Suryadevara, it was playing pickup soccer games with community members near Urubamba, a town nestled in the picturesque, mountainous region about 50 miles north of Cuzco.  “We get to decompress, have fun, and get to know each other,” said Andino, a rising senior majoring in neuroscience and global health.

These activities may seem peripheral to what the students hoped to accomplish in Peru, where they were part of DGHI’s first Student Research Training (SRT) team in the country. SRT is an intensive experiential learning program where undergraduate students work with community partners on collaboratively designed global health projects. The Peru team is working on research projects related to teen pregnancy and mental health in adolescents as part of a partnership with Vidawasi, a new children’s health center seeking to expand access to a range of health services across the remote Sacred Valley. 

But an equally important part of the students’ field experience is getting to know and understand local cultures and perspectives.

“If you don’t interact with the community and understand and learn from the community, nothing is going to be impactful,” said Ernesto Ortiz, M.D., affiliate faculty and senior program manager for DGHI’s Hubert-Yeargan Center for Global Health, who leads the Peru SRT program. 

Deepening Ties in Peru

Ortiz, a Peruvian-American who earned his medical degree and practiced in Peru, has forged many connections between DGHI researchers and organizations in his home country. That includes a growing relationship with Vidawasi, which has built a sprawling campus in the Andes mountains near Urubamba. Once the heart of the Incan empire and home to cultural treasures such as Machu Picchu, the region has few health facilities, and residents have typically had to travel many hours to reach all but the most basic medical services. 

“I’m lucky to be at Duke, surrounded by so many experts, and to be able to bring that expertise to help improve the well-being of the most underserved people in my country,” Ortiz said.

Thanks to Ortiz’s efforts, the inaugural SRT team isn’t starting from scratch. In 2024 and 2025, Ortiz mentored three global health students on research projects in the Cuzco region. Akhilesh Shivaramakrishnan, a global health and public policy major who graduated in 2025, conducted mental health interviews with secondary students, and 2026 graduates Kate Seneshen and Ally Carey identified social determinants of health related to teen pregnancy. 

All three met with the SRT students as they prepared for their field experience this past spring, and Seneshen and Carey participated in weekly zoom meetings with the team, Ortiz and representatives from Vidawasi. “The community partners trusted us and we helped serve as a bridge between them and the current students,” Seneshen said. 

“We’re setting the foundation for future SRT programs in Peru,” said rising junior Rosie Smolowitz, who is majoring in global health and psychology, “but they set the foundation for us. We’ve been able to form really strong relationships with the staff at Vidawasi and I don’t know if that would have happened without Kate and Ally and Akhilesh.”

Flexibility in the Field

Before traveling to Peru, the SRT team strategized ways to build on those previous projects. In his research, Shivaramakrishnan found students reported low levels of self-concept, and the team is expanding that work this summer by surveying more students at a wider range of grade levels. They are looking to see if his results hold up in a larger sample size, and if so, at what age those issues begin showing up. The team also worked with psychologists at Vidawasi to design and present workshops on emotional regulation for adolescents.

The students also planned to build on the research Seneshen and Carey did about social determinants of teen pregnancy. They hoped to offer in-person workshops for teens, parents and teachers to explore how to have conversations about sexual health, as well as a digital intervention for adolescents using weekly educational text messages about sexual and reproductive health. 

While delays in IRB approval prevented the students from implementing those interventions during their time in Peru, they were able to work through the delicate process of designing activities dealing with sex-related topics, which are often considered taboo in rural areas of Peru. “We worked with OBs and psychologists at Vidawasi and they provided insight that we could use,” said Suryadevara, a rising junior majoring in biology and global health. Both interventions will be ready for future SRT teams to carry out.

But the unexpected roadblocks haven’t taken anything away from the students’ experiences in the Sacred Valley, which have included shadowing physicians, meeting visiting medical professionals, being interviewed on Vidawasi’s radio and TV stations, presenting to 200 high-achieving Peruvian students, and preparing posters summarizing key takeaways from previous mental health surveys. “Even in IRB limbo, there is always something happening,” Smolowitz said.

When the students return to Duke this fall, they will analyze results from their mental health surveys and the emotional-regulation workshops and share findings with Vidawasi and local schools. They will also help prepare next summer’s SRT team to pick up where they left off, continuing ongoing research projects and nurturing the growing partnership.

“It takes time to build trust and systems,” said Lysa MacKeen, deputy director of academic programs at DGHI. “The mandate for the students in Peru was to see themselves as the foundational aspect of this relationship.”

“The challenge in global health is sustainability,” Ortiz said. “There’s always this perception of ‘Here comes the global north, doing the research, and then they leave.’ SRT makes it sustainable because each new cohort of students continues the work the previous cohorts started.”