Harvard-UTEC Collaboration Agreement
The Harvard–UTEC Collaboration Agreement
Joost J. Vlassak, PI
The Harvard-UTEC Collaboration Agreement establishes a strategic partnership between Harvard University and the Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología (UTEC) in Lima, Peru. The agreement supports collaborative education and research activities that bring together students and faculty from both institutions to address important societal challenges, with a particular emphasis on problems that benefit from engineering, applied science, design, and interdisciplinary approaches.
The agreement funds two major endeavors. The first is a student exchange program designed to create intense and sustained collaboration between Harvard College students and UTEC students. This program begins with a field experience in Peru each January, where students from Harvard and UTEC work together on pressing societal problems. The current field component is based in the Peruvian Amazon, in the Loreto region near Iquitos, providing students with the opportunity to engage directly with local communities, environmental conditions, infrastructure challenges, and regional needs. Through this experience, students identify and begin developing projects that respond to real-world problems in the Amazon context.
The second component of the student exchange brings UTEC students to Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences for a two-week visit. During this period, the UTEC students continue work on the project or problem identified during the January field trip. They also have the opportunity to engage with SEAS laboratories, interact with Harvard faculty, researchers, and students, and participate in site visits to local facilities relevant to their project. This structure allows the collaboration to extend beyond the field experience, giving students access to additional technical expertise, research infrastructure, and applied learning opportunities.
The agreement also establishes a seed fund to support innovative collaborative research between Harvard and UTEC principal investigators. The seed fund is intended to catalyze new research partnerships, encourage faculty engagement across the two institutions, and support early-stage projects with the potential to grow into larger, externally funded collaborations. By investing in both student-centered experiential learning and faculty-led research, the Harvard-UTEC Collaboration Agreement creates a framework for long-term academic exchange, joint problem-solving, and impactful research addressing challenges of shared importance.
Links:
Field Trips
Every January, we go on a field trip to Peru. During the field trip, students from Harvard and UTEC work together on pressing societal problems. In recent years, we have been going to the Iquitos area, but in the past we have also explored the Madre de Dios region in southern Peru, as well as the Andes Highlands. Here are some pictures taken during our 2026 trip
Doing lab work in a remote lodge
The river is the local highway
Water everywhere
How to provide clean water to local communities
Seed Projects
Every year we fund one or several collaborative research projects:
2026:
Maps We Can Trust: Proxy-Calibrated Inference for Child Health in Peru
PIs: Yue Lu, José Cerda Hernández
Child anemia and malnutrition remain serious public-health challenges in Peru, yet many districts lack enough survey data to produce reliable local estimates. Satellite imagery, climate information, roads, census records, and other geospatial data offer much broader coverage, but because they measure child health only indirectly, they can be misleading without careful statistical calibration.
This Harvard–UTEC collaboration will develop and test statistical methods that bring these sources together, with carefully designed household surveys serving as the foundation. The goal is to produce district-level estimates showing both where child-health risk may be elevated and where the evidence is too limited for confident conclusions. Harvard will contribute expertise in high-dimensional learning, multimodal data analysis, and uncertainty quantification, while UTEC will bring experience with spatial analysis, Peruvian survey data, and local training. The project will develop mapping tools that report uncertainty, study when geospatial data help or mislead, and create open teaching materials for data science in public policy.
2025:
Infectious disease surveillance of environmental waters and pit latrines in unsewered communities in the Peruvian Amazon
PIs: Megan Murray (HMS), Monica Santa-Maria Fuster (UTEC), Hannah Greenwald Healy (HSPH)
Abstract: Remote communities in the Peruvian Amazon face increasing risks from infectious diseases as climate change, deforestation, and ecosystem disruption reshape local disease ecologies. This project will develop and test wastewater-based epidemiology methods for unsewered Amazonian communities, focusing on river water impacted by human waste and pit latrines in communities without centralized water or sewage infrastructure. The team will identify suitable surveillance sites, optimize low-cost field methods for sample collection, concentration, and preservation, and design pathogen detection approaches for locally relevant tropical diseases. By comparing river-water and pit-latrine surveillance across dry and rainy seasons, the project aims to establish practical tools for monitoring infectious disease risks in remote settings. The work will also train students and local partners, support community-based environmental surveillance, and strengthen Harvard–UTEC collaboration at the intersection of public health, environmental engineering, climate resilience, and Indigenous well-being.
2023:
Chicha: where ancient traditions meet technology
PIs: Alejandra Ratti Parandelli, Pia M. Sörensen
Abstract: This project will study chicha produced by partner chicherias in the Sacred Valley, documenting preparation practices and analyzing how ingredients, local environments, and microbial communities shape the fermentation process and final beverage. The work will combine metagenomics, metabolomics, volatile aroma analysis, physicochemical measurements, and enzymatic assays with a novel high-throughput single-microbe genomics method developed at Harvard SEAS to achieve strain-level resolution of the microbial communities involved. In addition to advancing the scientific understanding of traditional fermented foods, the project will strengthen Harvard–UTEC collaboration in food science, fermentation, microbiology, and science education, while creating opportunities for student research and future work on Peru’s broader fermentation heritage.
Characterization of Materials in the Ramson Room of Atahualpa, Cajamarca, Peru: Technology, heritage conservation and memory in the Andes
PIs: Juan Carlos Rodriguez-Reyes, Solsire Cusicanqui, Maria Ines Velarde, Joost Vlassak
Abstract: This project brings together researchers from Harvard, UTEC, and Peruvian partner institutions to support the excavation, characterization, and conservation of the Ransom Room of Atahualpa in Cajamarca, Peru, one of the most historically significant Inka sites in the Andes. The team will use mineralogical, chemical, and mechanical characterization methods—including petrographic analysis, X-ray fluorescence, nanoindentation, X-ray diffraction, and electron microscopy - to study stone and other excavated materials from the site and identify mechanisms of degradation. The results will inform conservation strategies for Inka stone architecture while also contributing to archaeological interpretation of the site. The project will include workshops in Cajamarca and at Harvard to share results, train conservators and students, and strengthen long-term collaboration among UTEC, SEAS, Harvard’s Department of Anthropology, and Peruvian stakeholders.
Here are some pictures related to archaeological excavations of the area around the Cuarto del Rescate in Cajamarca:
Neighborhood of el Cuarto del Rescate in Cajamarca
Excavations underneath a contemporary floor
Cajamarca pottery shards
A silver fibula discovered at the site