Founders
S. Lynne Walker
Project Director
S. Lynne Walker is a Pulitzer Prize finalist who spent much of her career reporting from Mexico, where she served as Mexico City Bureau Chief from 1992 to 2008 for San Diego, Calif.-based Copley News Service.
Lynne was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for “Beardstown: Reflection of a Changing America,” a four-part series on a small Illinois town transformed by immigration. She was awarded the Maria Moors Cabot Prize from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2005 for her outstanding coverage of Latin America.
From 2008-2016, Lynne served as vice president of the Institute of the Americas, a nonprofit organization on the University of California, San Diego campus. There, she established the Institute’s regional journalism program, creating an international network of journalists and raising funds to provide them with scholarships to attend workshops that she organized and directed.
As president and executive director of InquireFirst, which she launched in 2016, Lynne continues to travel to Latin America to work with colleagues on new ways to produce in-depth reporting on science, health and the environment. She has conducted Spanish-language journalism workshops in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Colombia, Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina and Ecuador.
Iván Carrillo
Editor and Project Coordinator
Iván Carrillo is a journalist, documentary maker and producer specializing in science, the environment and the oceans, with over twenty years of experience across the Ibero-American media landscape. He has published and produced work for media outlets such as National Geographic, Knowable Magazine, CNN en Español, Discovery Channel, History Channel, Expansión, NCC Iberoamericano, and El Universal, among many others.
He is also the founder of collaborative projects such as Historias Sin Fronteras and has directed documentary series including El futuro del planeta, 1.5 grados para salvar al planeta, La ciencia del fútbol, and La ciencia a prueba.
Carrillo is the editor and host of En Común, a pioneering podcast that connects Indigenous journalists with scientists to deliver useful, evidence-based knowledge to rural communities in Mexico.
His work has received international recognition, including the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communication 2025, awarded by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM)—one of the most prestigious honors in the field of science communication. He has also received the Covering Climate Now Award, the TED Countdown Journalism Fellowship, grants from the Pulitzer Center, the National Geographic Society, Earth Journalism Network, and the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT.
He is currently developing transnational projects focused on marine conservation, climate change and solution-driven narratives.
