Pedro Valdés spent his childhood in Chicago, Illinois, USA, where he says his love of science began. After his family returned to Cuba in 1961, he studied medicine, received his PhD in biological sciences, and in 1990 at the age of 40, founded the Cuban Neuroscience Center with a group of young scientists that included his brother Mitchell, now the Center’s Director. Since then, the Center has accumulated an impressive record developing patented neuroimaging diagnostic equipment for national use and export, a nationwide infant screening program for hearing loss, and the Cuban Brain Mapping Project, among other pioneering efforts. The Center’s recruitment of new graduates keeps the median age of its professionals at 28, and its scientists are the island’s most widely published outside of Cuba.

The guidebooks call Mpumalanga one of the “often overlooked provinces” of South Africa.[1] Northeast of Johannesburg, its grassy hills are just a blur on the highway for foreign visitors heading to the spectacular game reserves of Kruger National Park. They will not often get to Themba Hospital in White River, just 50 miles from the border with Mozambique, serving over three million of Mpumalanga’s overwhelmingly rural population.