Professor's work to improve science communication earns him national fellowship
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School of Transborder Studies professor named science fellow in USDA program
Gilberto Lopez leads research on social and health inequities in Latino communities
Lopez believes more effective messaging about science is needed
Even as a child, Gilberto Lopez could sense there was something about the labor his farmworker parents did and the lifestyle it afforded them that didn’t add up.
Lopez, a Charter Professor in Arizona State University’s School of Transborder Studies, said his parents were Mexican immigrant farmworkers in California’s Central Valley who “worked the land but never owned it."
“One thing that always stuck in my mind is the irony that my family helped pick the fruits and vegetables that end up in the fancy Bay Area restaurants and grocery stores, but they could not afford to eat in those places,” Lopez said. “Additionally, much of that same fresh food was not readily available in our own community. Food production and food access are not the same thing.
“... I have been curious about this inequity since childhood.”
That curiosity led Lopez to become an award-winning scholar who leads research on addressing social and health inequities in Latino communities. He is also the founder of El Laboratorio, an interdisciplinary research and design studio that aims to communicate important scientific information and discoveries to the Latino communities it affects in a culturally tailored way.
That work led to him being selected as a 2026 Science Fellow for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's E. Kika De La Garza Fellowship Program, a nationally competitive program that brings faculty from colleges and universities across the country together with USDA scientists to strengthen research collaborations and advance science education.
The fellowship recognizes faculty whose work has the potential to strengthen connections between higher education and the USDA while expanding opportunities for interdisciplinary research and public engagement.
ASU News spoke with Lopez about the fellowship, what he learned from it and how it will impact his research moving forward.
Note: The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: What was one important takeaway from the fellowship?
Answer: One of the takeaways is breaking from this framework that agriculture in the U.S. and Mexico are two separate agricultural regions. In reality, it’s this interconnected space. And our food system depends on this flow of goods and resources and knowledge and people between these human-made borders. I never thought of food in those terms. But in the second week of my fellowship, I learned about new soil and the importance of soil, and how much research the U.S. government has been doing on soil, for more than 100 years, and how little the population knows about soil. So that’s one thing that really excited me about the fellowship and its potential to further my work in soil education, especially in Arizona, in the arid desert.
Q: So, what should we know about soil?
A: No. 1 is, don’t call it dirt. It’s the diversity of soil. Each state has an official soil, and people need to know, if you don’t have cover crops, what happens to soil with wind, the water, and how that affects agriculture. If you want to plant a garden, if you want to build a house, you need to know what kind of soil is underneath. What do you need to put in there in order for your house to be stable? What do you need to grow certain types of crops? I come from a farming community, but it was always this binary, good soil. But it’s much more nuanced than that.
Q: What did you learn about food supply and the USDA from the fellowship?
A: We talked to a lot of different agencies in the USDA, and one subject that really kind of stayed with me is the different statistics they use. For example, pork production and pork consumption changes over time. And that top-level data is provided to organizations. But my question was about the average small farmer who is already struggling. What can they do with this information? Can they understand what the hell it means if there’s a change in national production from 4.5 pigs to four pigs? How do we make sure they understand what that means? And what are the implications for them as they decide what resources to allocate to their farm? So, in that data, there’s a disconnect. That’s something I would like to work on.
Q: There’s a local angle to this. The Douglas Port of Entry is reopening Aug. 24 after being closed for more than a year due to concerns about screwworm infestations. Can you speak to how federal agencies can better communicate about issues like this?
A: I’m not an expert on screwworms, but I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding on what it is. The better messaging is talking about the pathway in which it enters animals and how it might affect humans or not. Just making it culturally tailored in not just languages but in concepts that people can understand. Also, what is the federal government doing? We talked about opening, but there’s this phased reopening, which means it’s not business as usual. So what does that mean? And what is being done in each of these phases? I think transparency and information is needed for the general population, and specifically in border communities.
Q: Do you think that messaging isn’t being effectively communicated to border communities right now?
A: In general, when it comes to science, we’re not doing a good job of making sure communities are getting the word on whatever is (going on). Unfortunately, we’ve seen a lot of misinformation and disinformation that’s spreading at a very rapid pace. A lot of distrust and mistrust in scientists, and that’s a little worrisome. It’s sort of an uphill battle, but we need to do a better job of making sure that our science goes to the people first. As scientists and researchers, we love to do peer-reviewed journals and talk to each other and go to conferences. And I think that needs to change. People need the information.
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