Working together as a mission-driven and results-oriented organization
Photo credit: Tom Laffay
Leadership
United States
Jason Glaser
CEO
Jason is the CEO of La Isla Network. His objective is to drive research and policy that furthers understanding and prevention of occupational heat stress and its consequences. His effort to address illness, injury, and death in occupational settings led him to a Master of Science in Epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Jason’s work has driven companies and governments to begin prioritizing occupational safety in key supply chains, this being recognized worldwide in academic journals, films, news, and more.
United States
Ilana Weiss
CPO
Ilana is the Chief Program Officer. She started at LIN in 2012 to help establish and lead research activities. Today she is project lead for nearly all of LIN’s programs, research, and activities. She is passionate about research having a tangible impact on the people and communities affected by occupational heat stress.
Spain
Scott Montegna
COO
Scott is the Chief Operations Officer. He oversees the internal operations that support the organization’s on-the-ground programs. He has an M.A. in International Development with Public Health focus. Scott has nearly 20 years experience in the public health field managing chronic disease initiatives with U.S. state health departments and non-governmental organizations. He is based in Granada, Spain.
Costa Rica
Ineke Wesseling
CSO
Catharina (Ineke) Wesseling is the CSO Lead Epidemiologist. She provides oversight and leadership for the LIN International Research Team. She is a leading expert on chronic kidney disease of non-traditional causes (CKDnt) and the impact of heat stress on kidney health, having published her work extensively and being recognized by institutions like PAHO. Ineke was the first President of the working group on CKDnt, known as CENCAM. Before joining LIN she was the founding Director of the Program of Work and Health in Central America (SALTRA).
Costa Rica
Esteban Arias
VP of health and hygiene
Esteban is the Lead Hygienist. He provides oversight and leadership for the International Research Team in data collection. His specialty is the measurement of thermal stress and workload mainly in environments affected by climate change. Esteban also evaluates work conditions in the field sites and assesses interventions designed to improve working conditions on the fields.
United States
Javier Vasquez
Senior Legal and Policy Advisor
Javier is the Senior Legal and Policy Advisor. He provides legal advice to the organization and its teams . He has more than 30 years of experience in coordinated planning efforts for international health programs in consultation with international and regional multilateral agencies, governments, and non-governmental organizations such as the OAS, Special Olympics International and the UN Special Envoy on Disability and Accessibility. Javier has had 17 years of responsibility and achievements in human rights and health law with PAHO.
United States
Heath Prince
SENIOR DEVELOPMENT ECONOMIST
Heath is the Senior Development Economist. He is a research scientist at the University of Texas in Austin, where his work focuses on identifying the drivers of poverty in primary data collection, evaluation design, and statistical analysis methods. He serves as co-PI on ENSURE-Nepal, LIN’s US State Department-funded examination of the health and socioeconomic outcomes for migrant workers from Nepal.
Netherlands
Matthijs Nieuwenhuis
Director of European Development
Matthijs is responsible for corporate engagement in Europe. His goal is to connect people and businesses, helping each other unlock opportunities for growth and innovation. Matthijs is a trusted and strategic consultant, having 25 years of experience in Central America and Europe in the field of human rights and sustainability.
Spain
Jessica Rodriguez
Director of Global Impact
Jessica is the Director of Global Impact and the Project Director of ENSURE-Nepal. She researches organizational development, the political representation of women and immigrants, sustainable community development, and mediation of high-conflict political issues. She brings over 17 years experience in understanding systemic inequalities in community research. She is bilingual Spanish/English and is the proud daughter of hard-working immigrant parents. Her lived and professional experience centers around the contributions of the global majority.
Research Network
The Research Network ensures that the research La Isla Network funds and helps design is of the highest quality.
They assess La Isla Network’s research priorities, the merits of the research we fund, and provide evaluations of other parties’ research to use in our communications about heat stress, and its health and economic impacts.
Greece
Andreas Flouris
Dr. Flouris is a Professor of Physiology at the University of Thessaly Department of Exercise Science in Greece, and a Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Ottawa, Canada. For over 15 years he has advised governments and international organizations including the WHO, ILO, WMO and others on the effects of climate change and environmental factors οn health, productivity, impact assessment, and risk communication. He is widely published and participates in many projects worldwide addressing relevant issues.
Kuwait
Barrak Alahmad
Dr. Alahmad is a research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health. He works on air quality, climate change, and health in the Middle East, specifically the adverse impacts of dust storms, extreme temperatures on migrant worker health. His work is highlighted by organizations such as the WHO and the AHA, and the media. In 2022, he was named in the inaugural list of 40 Under 40 Public Health Catalyst Awardees highlighting rising leaders and innovators of the public health field by the Boston Congress of Public Health. He is from Kuwait.
United States
David Wegman
Dr. Wegman is principal investigator on intervention studies directed at reducing or eliminating chronic kidney disease among sugarcane workers. He is an epidemiologist, Professor Emeritus at University of Massachusetts Lowell and Adjunct Professor at Harvard School of Public Health.
Sweden
Erik Hansson
Dr. Hansson is a Swedish medical doctor. He has also done a MSc in Epidemiology at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. In 2022, he defended his PhD thesis on “Occupational heat exposure and kidney disease” at University of Gothenburg, primarily studying sugarcane workers in Nicaragua within the Adelante Initiative. He is interested in understanding the biological processes underlying heat-induced acute kidney injury and the transition from this condition to chronic kidney disease.
Brazil
Fabiano Amorim
Dr. Amorim is Associate Professor in the Exercise Science Program at the University of New Mexico. He is an exercise and thermal physiologist with extensive experience conducting studies with humans in both laboratory and field settings. His research focuses on investigating the acute and chronic responses to physical work associated with heat stress, spanning from whole-body to molecular levels. He aims to translate his findings into actionable measures that enhance worker safety.
Chile
Felipe Pacheco-Zenteno
Felipe Pacheco Zenteno is a Chilean organizational psychologist, with a background in linguistics. He is based in Sweden and affiliated with the University of Gothenburg where he pursued a M.Sc. in Global Health. He investigates the organizational and behavioral factors influencing the implementation of occupational health interventions in the sugarcane and textile/garment sectors.
The Netherlands
Hans Kromhout
Dr. Kromhout is an international authority on occupational and environmental exposure assessment and epidemiology based at the Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. His work has covered the health effects of chemical and physical agents in the workplace and general environment.
Singapore
Jason Lee
Dr. Lee is Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore School of Medicine. His research focuses on fluid balance and heat stress, extreme physiology, and the effects of heat on worker health and productivity. He chairs the Scientific Committee on Thermal Factors at the ICOH. He is on the management committee at the Global Heat Health Information Network, an initiative by WHO and WMO. He has been tasked to direct the Southeast Asia Heat Health Node to scale up efforts in managing the risks posed by rising temperatures.
Sweden
Kristina Jakobsson
Dr. Jakobsson is a physician who specializes in occupational and environmental medicine. At La Isla Network, she is part of the Adelante Initiative and focuses on workplace exposure assessments for epidemiologic studies. She does research on how to use GIS as a tool for understanding CKDnt and its environmental correlates in Central America, India, and Sri Lanka.
United States
Nate Raines
Dr. Raines is a nephrologist with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and a faculty member at Harvard Medical School. He is a medical researcher whose focus is on understanding the clinical aspects, epidemiology, and pathophysiology of CKDnt. He has been involved with La Isla Network for over a decade in various capacities. As a La Isla volunteer, he led one of the earliest prevalence studies of CKDnt in Nicaragua in 2012. In 2017 he joined the org’s Board of Directors and served as chair. He also serves as co-chairperson for CENCAM.
South Africa
Rajen Nithiseelan Naidoo
Rajen is Professor in and Head of the Department of Occupational and Environmental Health at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He has been in academic research for about 25 years, focusing on occupational and environmental respiratory diseases and more recently on weather-related health effects. He has over 120 peer-reviewed publications, with presentations at several international conferences. He is an Associate Editor of the International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health and the Journal of Occupational Medicine and Toxicology.
United Kingdom
Rebekah Lukas
Dr. Lucas is an integrative physiologist with an interest in how exercise and environmental physiology translates to clinical medicine and public health. She examines human tolerance and adaptation to physical and environmental stressors, with a focus on occupational heat stress. Her research spans physiological and public health disciplines, moving between lab-based experimental studies and field-based studies in challenging environments, with the aim of translating experimental data into large-scale interventions and policy.
South Africa
Saloshni Naidoo
Dr. Naidoo is the Head of Public Health Medicine at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She is a National Research Foundation C2-rated researcher, qualified as a Public Health Medicine Specialist with additional expertise in Occupational and Environmental Health. Throughout her career, she has focused on investigating the impacts of the environment on vulnerable populations, particularly women, children, and workers with growing involvement in health systems strengthening research.
El Salvador
Sandra Peraza
Sandra Peraza, M.Sc. is a pharmaceutical chemist with specializations in environmental chemistry and occupational health. She is an expert in occupational hygiene, mainly in chemical and physical risks. She is a professor of analytical chemistry at the University of El Salvador, national coordinator of the SALTRA project, and researcher of the WE program. She is responsible for PREP 4 Change at the national level in El Salvador.
United States
Shailendra Sharma
Dr. Sharma works in climate health. His interests and areas of work focus on understanding the intersection of heat stress and kidney health among Nepali migrant workers in hot, humid and temperate climates. He is involved in various community and clinic-based studies of chronic kidney disease (CKD). He holds the position of Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Michigan Health-Sparrow and is a member of the scientific advisory committee for the Nepal Development Society.
Swaziland
Sibusiso Msibi
Sibusiso is a researcher and head of the Department of Public Health Management at the Institute of Development Management in Eswatini. He is an expert in environmental health, and is currently pursuing a PhD in public health with a focus on epidemiology. As part of his doctoral research, Sibusiso established a network of stakeholders in Eswatini addressing heat-related health outcomes among cane cutters. Through his research he is interacting with workers, worker organizations, plantation owners, and government agencies.
New Zealand
Tord Kjellstrom
Dr. Kjellstrom has been a researcher and academic teacher over four decades, primarily in the environmental and occupational epidemiology fields. He initially carried out epidemiological studies of the effects of cadmium, lead, methyl-mercury, asbestos and children’s traffic accidents.
India
Vidhya Venugopal
Dr. Venugopal is an environmental chemist and industrial hygienist. She focuses on occupational heat stress impacts on health and productivity on workers in formal and informal sectors in the context of climate change. She is a professor of occupational and environmental health at Sri Ramachandra University of Higher Education and Research based in Chennai, India.
United States
Zachary Schlader
Dr. Schlader is Senior Research Advisor for La Isla Network. He is an Associate Professor at the Department of Kinesiology in the Indiana University Bloomington School of Public Health. His research and expertise are focused on the integrative physiology of environmental and/or occupational stressors such as heat, with a particular emphasis on renal and cardiovascular physiology. His work spans preclinical, clinical (lab-based human subjects), and field-based research domains.
staff
Esteban Arias
VP of health and hygiene
Organizational chart
Board of Directors
The board consists of Jason Glaser as president and David Luzquinos as chair. The advisors are Nate Raines, Mark Thomas, Eric Gilroy, Deliana Garcia, and Vidhya Venugopal. If you have interest or know someone who would be interested in the governance and fundraising of La Isla Network, please contact us.