Bolivian writer Prof. José Edmundo Paz-Soldán, Romance studies, has been organizing conferences and informal workshops to bring together Latin American and Latino writers at Cornell.

Dean of the Johnson School Joseph Thomas recently traveled to Bogota, Colombia, and Monterrey, Mexico, as part of a Johnson School initiative, first announced in December 2010, to expand the Cornell - Queen’s Executive MBA Program to Latin America.

While about 240 students enrolled in the University from Latin American in the late 1990s and 2000s, only 186 attended in 2011 — a decline of almost 23 percent, according to a report from Cornell’s International Students and Scholars Office.

The Sun checks out an exhibit on the artistry in everyday objects used in Pre-Columbian Latin America.

During the 1980s, Prof. Monroe Weber-Shirk, civil and environmental engineering, volunteered in Latin American refugee camps. At the time, he was convinced that he would devote the rest of his life to development work in Latin America, but his plans were thwarted by a diagnosis of Hodgkin’s disease and his return to the U.S. for treatment. While pursuing a Ph.D. at Cornell, he placed his aspirations of improving the quality of life in Latin America on the back burner. A few years ago, he received a serendipitous phone call that put into motion an engineering project that would make his decades-long dream come true.