Santiago Mota (MDE ’18) maps Laredo

Santiago Mota (MDE ’18) spent the summer “Mapping patterns of poverty in Laredo, Texas” as a Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative fellowship recipient.

“To understand why poverty is so persistent across generations, city leaders asked Santiago Mota, who is pursuing a master’s in design engineering, a joint degree program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), to create a “heat map” of Laredo using GIS (geographic information system) data and department records to measure need block by block and to pinpoint underlying local factors driving ongoing poverty.”