I am honored and grateful to have been awarded the APH Mental Health Work Visit grant. My visit was initially planned as a work visit to the Icahn School of Medicine in New York City. However, due to changes in the political and immigration landscape of the USA, APH and I agreed on changing the destination of my work visit to Mexico.
This October, I attended the World Congress of Psychiatric Genetics (WCPG) in Cancún, followed by a visit to the Centro de Ciencias Genómicas (CCG) at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in beautiful Mexico City. This visit was particularly meaningful for me as it marked the first time that WCPG was held in a Latin American country, breaking a more than 30-year tradition of meetings in the Global North. I was selected as a finalist for Best Oral Presentation and presented, for the first time, my new research line on the white norm in human genetic research and the systematic exclusion of the majority of the world from genetic datasets and studies.
Another highlight was learning about psychiatric genetics in Latin America and the newly established Mexican Biobank. At UNAM-CCG, I met with Prof. Mashaal Sohail and her team, which led to rich discussions and concrete ideas for future Amsterdam–Mexico City research collaborations.
Thank you to APH for making this visit possible!