US and Cuban Researchers to Meet in Havana

Rush Holt of AAAS talks with The Scientist about the upcoming gathering and collaborations—past, present, and future—between the two countries.

Written byBob Grant

| 4 min read

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WIKIMEDIA, UNITED STATES CONGRESSIn June, President Donald Trump announced that he was reversing course on former President Barack Obama’s decision to mend relations with Cuba. “The previous administration's easing of restrictions of travel and trade does not help the Cuban people,” Trump said at a rally in Miami. “They only enrich the Cuban regime.”

But prior to Trump assuming the presidency, scientists in the two countries had already charted a path to increase international collaboration. In 2014, a group of American researchers and policy experts, sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), met with Cuban counterparts at the Cuban Academy of Sciences in Havana. The result of that meeting was a memorandum of understanding between the two parties that outlined a plan to regularly meet to find scientific common ground between the two nations’ research enterprises.

The first meeting took place in December 2015 and focused on neuroscience. The second, held in May of last year, involved cancer immunotherapy. The third meeting will be held this week at the Cuban Academy of Sciences and the ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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