Ángel F. Adames-Corraliza

And then my brain just completely melted and I don't remember anything else from the call, to be honest.

You know, coming from Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico is a small island.

We do have our contributions to society.

We're kind of known for the arts and for like music, for example.

But we don't often get recognition for science, especially in my discipline.

You know, like as a community, we've been invisible.

And to be able to receive this award where somebody comes out to you, in this case, the MacArthur Foundation, and they tell me, like, no, we see you, you know, and we see what you're doing and we think that what you do matters.

It's not just what you're doing, but what your community is doing.

To me, this is everything.

Yes.

Yeah, it's most of Australia, like a good chunk of Australia, New Zealand, this very southern part of Africa and kind of like the southern half of South America.

And almost the entirety of like first world countries in the northern hemisphere, which is something that is relevant to the research that I do.

Okay.

The majority of the developed countries, they're used to the stuff that I see here in Madison, Wisconsin, which is like it gets really cold some days, some days it gets really warm.

Weather is very, very changing.

Temperatures change very dramatically.

It can be really, really, really dry.

Got it.

So there was a lot of common knowledge.

For example, the indigenous populations of the Caribbean knew about hurricanes.