Daniel is originally from El Salvador. Born and raised in San Salvador, Daniel moved to the United States in 2010 after completing high school to pursue a university education. He received a B.S. in Geography from Mansfield University (USA) and a MSc. Environmental Science and Policy degree from the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary.

After witnessing firsthand the environmental and economic degradation in Tasajera Island, in 2011, Daniel co-founded the EMANA Initiative – a non-profit organization with the purpose of channeling funds into development projects in Tasajera. Ever since the beginning of EMANA, Daniel has been part of educational projects, women empowerment initiatives, waste management, and local data initiatives.

Currently, Daniel is in Tasajera, El Salvador working on the Project Team of Mareas de Tasajera, a local monitoring platform for the sustainable development of Tasajera. This project was launched as a response to data gaps on issues that affect community life.

Daniel has been granted a Dean’s fellowship to pursue a doctoral degree at the University of Maryland in the fall 2016, where he is going to join the Department of Geographical Sciences to continue the research on Socio-Ecological Systems.

Originally from Winnipeg, Canada, Franklin Kirk Wright was selected as a Loran Scholar in 2014 and is currently pursuing an Honours Bachelor of Arts in Economics with minors in Computer Science and International Development Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. His primary area of academic interest is the effect of increased access to information capital on development, with a focus on community-level development.

In the summer of 2015, Kirk worked as an intern at the International Institute for Sustainable Development at their head office in Winnipeg. The bulk of his work was focused on a community indicator system called “Peg”. While with IISD, Kirk composed a full project review, contributed to articles on the establishment of community indicator systems and participated in the general operations of the project.

In 2016, Kirk is working as a Guest Researcher for the EMANA Initiative in El Salvador to establish Mareas de Tasajera, a community indicator system for Tasajera, El Salvador. Such systems are relatively new to the world of development, and their application at such a small scale in a rural community such as Tasajera is quite innovative. Kirk is excited to be a part of this project and see firsthand its impact on the community.