Every year, Brown offers an array of funding for students to study and conduct specialized research on campus. A select few take their studies abroad.
Several of these opportunities are either provided directly through or in tandem with the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, taking the form of academic scholarships, fellowships and grants to sponsor student travel to Brazil.
Whether it's a hands-on study of participatory budgeting, developing an app to monitor heart failure medication or rescuing and rehabilitating marine wildlife, Brown students are finding new ways to extend their studies and expand their impact in their fields.
The Herald sat down with three students who recently traveled to Brazil to learn about each of their experiences volunteering and conducting research.
Michelle Alas Molina ’25: Studying participatory budgeting in São Paulo
In her month-long trip to Brazil, Michelle Alas Molina ’25 asked: What should an ideal democracy and education system look like?
A concentrator in both International and Public Affairs and Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Molina spent the month of August in Araraquara, a suburb of São Paulo, where she studied participatory budgeting as part of her senior thesis.
To support her work, Molina received the Royce Fellowship, a scholarship through the Swearer Center for public service and engagement.
According to Molina, participatory budgeting is “an institution where a municipality opens up forums for residents of a city to come and discuss their needs as a community, come up with proposals for those needs, and then vote on those proposals so they can be funded by the city budget.”
The practice began in Brazil in 1989 after the end of the Brazilian military dictatorship, Molina explained.
Throughout the month, Molina observed the politics and execution of participatory budgeting projects in Araraquara, asking questions about the roles of political parties and elected officials in this process. “It was a lot of me talking (and) reviewing documents that were available in the office” like maps, bylaws and governmental plans, Molina said.
Molina’s interest in participatory budgeting stems back to her freshman year, when she taught classes on participatory budgeting for middle schoolers in Rhode Island.
When conducting this outreach, she noticed that many community members were Cape Verdean and largely spoke Portuguese or Cape Verdean Creole. She decided to learn Portuguese and “fell in love with it.”
Last summer, she received the U.S. Department of Education’s Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship to do intensive language study in Brazil. She regularly traveled to Araraquara to observe the city’s participatory budgeting scene, which motivated her to come back this August.
After her most recent trip, Molina believes she has “a deeper understanding of how history intersects with contemporary politics, how language intersects and what people are doing on the ground now.”
Annelie Delgado ’27: Wildlife Preservation in Florianópolis
This past summer, Annelie Delgado ’27 spent a month caring for penguins, seagulls and other marine animals. A substantial portion of that work involved “post-mortem examinations,” Delgado said.
Delgado received a scholarship through the Patricia and Rexford Parker (’74) Fund, which supports Brown students in academic travel to Brazil. With this scholarship, she was able to travel to Florianópolis, a city in the south of Brazil, to volunteer for the nonprofit R3 Animal, which focuses on the rescue and rehabilitation of marine wildlife.
Delgado and other student volunteers worked on multiple projects throughout the summer, including monitoring the nearby shore, caring for the rescued animals and assisting in post-mortem examinations of recovered animals.
On days when Delgado wasn’t working, she would take Portuguese lessons nearby. But she still faced challenges in trying to communicate in the rehabilitation world.
“There was just a whole new vocabulary,” she said. “We didn’t really talk a lot about animal conservation in any of the Portuguese classes I have taken so far, so I learned a lot.”
Before coming to Brown as a first-year, Delgado took a gap year, spending six months in Lisbon to learn the language. “My dad’s Cape Verdean, so he and his entire family speak Portuguese, but I didn’t,” she said.
“When you’re going someplace new,” it’s always important to “not only keep an open mind, but to be excited to experience novelty,” Delgado said.
Akshay Malhotra ’25: Conducting cardiology research in Rio de Janeiro
When he arrived at Brown, Akshay Malhotra ’25 hoped to study the intersection between humanities and healthcare. But he quickly found himself immersed in Portuguese through a first-year seminar offered by the department. Now, he’s double-concentrating in both Ethnic Studies and Portuguese and Brazilian Studies.
“I feel like I had never really found Portuguese and Brazilian Studies and pre-med (to be) very disparate things,” he said. “I was looking for an opportunity that would sort of morph all of those together with my passion with cardiology.”
Malhotra spent the first two weeks of September in Rio de Janeiro working on an app that monitors heart failure medication for patients.
Malhotra’s project was funded through the Swearer Center’s Edward Guiliano ’72 Global Fellowship, a fund for conducting research around the world.
“My biggest interest was looking at the primary care system in Brazil, because the way that their healthcare system works is very different from the United States,” Malhotra said. He hopes to use what he learns in Brazil to improve the healthcare system in rural America.
A typical day in Brazil for Malhotra involved conversing with research nurses who worked on the project to “see how the app worked in real time.”
The need for the app grows every day, as it allows patients to access the most effective and optimized version of their healthcare, Malhotra explained. Using bluetooth technology, it allows patients to monitor their blood pressure, weight and other vitals on a daily basis.
“It’s really giving agency to the patient and giving them autonomy to really understand, ‘Okay, what is heart failure?’” Malhotra said.
Malhotra said his biggest takeaway from his time in Brazil — other than his time singing karaoke renditions of Rihanna and eating barbecue with his fellow researchers — was the meaningful relationships he developed.
