S. Lynne Walker is the president and executive director of InquireFirst and co-founder of Historias sin Fronteras, which was established in 2019 to provide reporting grants to science, health and environment writers in Latin America.
Lynne is a Pulitzer Prize finalist who spent much of her career reporting from Mexico, where she served as Mexico City Bureau Chief from 1992 to 2008 for San Diego, Calif.-based Copley News Service.
Her four-part series on a small Illinois town transformed by immigration, “Beardstown: Reflection of a Changing America,” was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting. She was awarded the Maria Moors Cabot Prize from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2005 for her outstanding coverage of Latin America.
As executive director of InquireFirst, which she founded in 2016, Lynne continues to travel to Latin America to work with colleagues on new ways to produce in-depth reporting on science, health and the environment and conduct investigative reporting. She has instructed Spanish-language journalism workshops in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Colombia, Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina and Ecuador.
Lynne also launched Bajo la Lupa, a grant program to support investigative reporting in Latin America and she is the co-founder of En Común: Conocimiento en Voz Viva, a Spanish-language radio program that reports on science, health and the environment for rural and indigenous audiences in Mexico.
Iván Carrillo
Editor general
Iván Carrillo is a journalist, documentary maker and producer specializing in science, the environment and the oceans, with over twenty years of experience across the Ibero-American media landscape. He has published and produced work for media outlets such as National Geographic, Knowable Magazine, CNN en Español, Discovery Channel, History Channel, Expansión, NCC Iberoamericano, and El Universal, among many others.
He is also the founder of collaborative projects such as Historias sin Fronteras and has directed documentary series including El futuro del planeta, 1.5 grados para salvar al planeta, La ciencia del fútbol, and La ciencia a prueba.
Carrillo is the editor and host of En Común, a pioneering podcast that connects Indigenous journalists with scientists to deliver useful, evidence-based knowledge to rural communities in Mexico.
His work has received international recognition, including the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communication 2025, awarded by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM)—one of the most prestigious honors in the field of science communication. He has also received the Covering Climate Now Award, the TED Countdown Journalism Fellowship, grants from the Pulitzer Center, the National Geographic Society, Earth Journalism Network, and the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT.
He is currently developing transnational projects focused on marine conservation, climate change and solution-driven narratives.
REPORTAGE
Simón Zapata Alzate
A journalist from the University of Antioquia, currently based in Villavicencio, Colombia, Simón began his first investigations and publications in university journalism collectives and the DelaUrbe laboratory, where he participated in collaborative research projects.
He was a recipient of the Jóvenes por el Cambio program from Colombia’s Ministry of Cultures, Arts, and Knowledge, with the project Yarumal: Nonfiction Encounters, a series of three short documentaries on peace, culture and heritage made in collaboration with students from the San Luis Educational Institution in Yarumal. These projects earned him the Comfama Award for Community Journalism and Alternative Stories with Purpose in 2023.
He has also been part of the Corporación Con-Vivamos and the community newspaper Mi Comuna 2, both based in the northeastern zone of Medellín. After graduating, he worked as a journalist for 360 Radio, covering economic and political issues.
Since early 2024, he has been part of El Cuarto Mosquetero, an alternative and popular media outlet, where he writes stories about peacebuilding, gender issues and defense of the land and the environment. Through his work, he aims to amplify the voices of the Amazorinoquia, a vast Colombian region encompassing the Orinoquía region and the Amazon rainforest, by shedding light on environmental struggles, human rights violations, popular resistance, and community-based nature conservation initiatives. He has been a fellow at Consejo de Redacción, CONNECTAS, and Mongabay Latam.
Oscar Bermeo Ocaña
Obsessive newspaper reading was my initiation rite into this field. Almost without realizing it, I absorbed the textual forms of journalism. I studied journalism at Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP). I worked in corporate communications, was a political video reporter, and later joined the culture section of El Comercio. I met diverse people and experienced different realities. I traveled for work, on assignments where the most important thing ended up being what was left out of the final text. Years later, I complemented the use of the written word with audiovisual language. I made a feature-length documentary about unknown marathon runners in the Peruvian Andes. In the mountains, we found stories of endless perseverance.
In recent years, based in Argentina—the country that welcomed me—I returned to academia, completing a master’s degree in cultural studies. And I wrote articles for El Comercio, focusing on issues concerning the Peruvian community.
Since 2019, I have been a regular contributor to Mongabay Latam. I have conducted research and written articles on biodiversity conservation projects, reports of deforestation, and the social issues surrounding the climate crisis. I was also a Climate Tracker fellow, covering the conferences on the Escazú Agreement. Later I joined its climate mentorship program, producing articles on the need for an equitable energy transition in Peru.
In 2024, I was selected as a fellow in the Climate Investigations Course of the Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) and CONNECTAS, where I explored Peru’s unfulfilled commitments to ecosystem restoration.
Clara Ferrer Puccio
Journalist and graduate in social communication from Córdoba, Argentina. Throughout my career, I have worked for the digital platforms of several media outlets, including La Voz del Interior, the largest news organization outside Buenos Aires, and Climate Tracker International.
In 2022, I was selected for Climate Tracker’s Media Fellowship, which supported three investigations that I conducted on the impact of climate change in Argentina. I continued to collaborate with Climate Tracker Latin America on several occasions, particularly during the coverage of the first Conference of the Parties to the Escazú Agreement (COP1).
My work is rooted in the Latin American narrative tradition, through which I seek to tell the intricate stories that connect environment and society. I’ve carried out investigations and on-the-ground reporting on a wide range of issues, from wildlife trafficking and access to clean water to forest fires, pollution and climate negotiations.
Natalie Gilbert
Independent communicator, graduate of the Austral University of Chile. I have worked across various local media outlets in southern Chile, including print, radio and television.
I co-founded the digital media platform Proyectoaurora.cl, where we covered issues related to the environment, human rights, and Indigenous people. I have also worked in media outreach and press management for various projects focused on heritage, culture, literature and human rights.
In 2023, I was in charge of production, editing and post-production for two podcasts: Territorios Creadores: Writing, Illustration, and Publishing for Children’s and Young Adult Literature (by Gota de Lluvia) and I Think, Therefore I Consume (by the Consumers and Users Association of Los Ríos, ACOVAL).
I currently work as Communications Officer for the Mapuche Association Ad Kimvn and co-producer of the podcast Old Age Behind Bars: Elderly Women Convicted Under Chile’s Drug Laws, produced by Sociedad Crónica. One of my recent investigations focuses on the disappearance of Mapuche leader Julia Chuñil Catricura, who has been missing for more than 100 days. The report delves into the territorial conflict surrounding her disappearance, in which a local businessman and the National Corporation for Indigenous Development (CONADI) are both implicated.
