Isabel Huesa

Background

About Isabel Huesa

Isabel (Isa) Huesa is a recent graduate from Washington University in St. Louis, where she received her A.B. in Anthropology: Global Health and Environment and South Asian Languages and Cultures. Isa's senior honors thesis,"The Evolution of Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaigns: Examining an Oral History of Student Motivations, Tactics, and Rejection Discourse at Washington University in St. Louis and Harvard University," helped earn her the departmental "Excellence in Anthropology" award. A proud WashU alumna, Isa’s interests lie at the intersection of social justice, the environment, and health disparities. She has dedicated her undergraduate career to understanding disease impact and harm reduction in marginalized communities, expanding student mental healthcare access, fighting for social justice issues, and examining Washington University’s role within greater St. Louis. An advocate at heart, Isa mentored students as a mental health peer counselor, advised university leadership as the undergraduate representative to WashU’s Board of Trustees, and—in the wake of Missouri’s statewide abortion ban—led outreach efforts to under-serviced communities for Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region. Her independent civic summer project on targeted peer-to-peer interventions among rural youth in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, India, was supported by the Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement’s Civic Scholarship. During her senior year, Isa traveled to Dubai to participate in the 28th United Nations’ climate change conference as an observer and worked as a student consultant in the Interdisciplinary Environmental Law Clinic's Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) team at WashU Law. At the culmination of her undergraduate career, Isa is excited to continue applying her anthropological research skills and interests in the social determinants of disease on an independent project that will analyze the impacts of remote mental health HIV interventions for vulnerable populations in Delhi, India as a Fulbright-Nehru research scholar.