Opportunities

Student Opportunities

Community connection and advanced research with real public-health impact

Projeto Dourados offers opportunities for motivated students to contribute to an interdisciplinary research and outreach initiative at the intersection of social science, epidemiology, Indigenous public health, and international collaboration between Brazil and the United States.

Student involvement may include research support, documentation and storytelling, or technical development, depending on individual interests and background.

Goals and Learning Outcomes

Learn by doing. Contribute meaningfully.

For All Students

Participants will:

• Learn about Indigenous public health in Brazil, with a focus on the Dourados Indigenous Reserve.
• Gain exposure to epidemiology, social science, interdisciplinary, and international research.
• Develop skills in communicating complex research topics clearly to broad audiences.

Documentation, Storytelling, and Outreach

Students interested in writing, communication, or community-facing work may:

• Learn about Indigenous languages spoken in the Reserve, including Guaraní and Terena.
• Study the history of the Dourados Indigenous Reserve and Brazil’s Indigenous reserve system.
• Publicize stories and findings on social media, in written pieces, and in documentary videos in the four Project languages: Guarani and Terena in addition to Portuguese and English.
• Compare Indigenous public-health contexts across Brazilian states, including:
  • Mato Grosso do Sul, where the city of Dourados and the Reserve are immediate neighbors,
  • Amazonas, where Indigenous communities are geographically dispersed and often distant from urban centers, and
  • Bahia, where Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations are more socially integrated.

These comparisons help situate Dourados within a broader national context and highlight how social structure shapes public-health challenges.

Figure 1: A hospital in the city of Dourados displays both Portuguese and Guarani names of locations in hospital signage.

Social Science and Epidemiology–Based Tool Development

Students with interests in data, modeling, or computation may:

• Learn R programming for data analysis and modeling.
• Contribute to websites and data dashboards built with Quarto.
• Learn how mathematical models are used to describe infectious-disease outbreaks.
• Apply Bayesian statistical methods to study how social and epidemiological factors influence disease spread, including:
  • village of residence,
  • Indigenous ethnicity,
  • and circulating COVID-19 variants.

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Project opportunities will be announced on this page as they become available.

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