Gabriela Soto Laveaga

Areas of Research: Modern Latin America; intersection of science and culture; public health; scientific and medical exchange in the Global South

I research, write, and teach about the role of unacknowledged protagonists —both individuals and countries— in producing scientific knowledge. My aim is not, however, to simply acknowledge those overlooked in other narratives but rather to provide a fuller historical context so we can tell histories differently. While my area of expertise is Latin America, particularly Mexico, in nearly sixty articles, national and international Op-Eds, and three books (one nearing completion), I examine broader questions of knowledge production and erasure on a global scale.

My award-winning work includes Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill (Duke University Press) which narrates how a wild tuber found in southern Mexico contained the chemical compounds needed to produce the first viable oral contraceptive, cortisone in commercial quantities, and 300 other patent medications. The tuber could only be found using local peasants’ knowledge bringing together local, national, and world scales to understand the impact of the ongoing global search for medicinal plants.  Jungle Laboratories won the Robert K. Merton Best Book prize in Science, Knowledge, and Technology Studies from the American Sociological Association

The World in a Wheat Field: Mexico, Science and the Challenge of Ending Global Hunger (University of California Press) focused on the people, land, and water beyond the walls of one of the world’s most important crop research stations. Doing so allowed me to re-narrate the Green Revolution from the perspective of those most impacted by science and agrotechnology.  In writing about the counternarratives of scientific discovery, I introduce not just people, but places often not associated with scientific invention.  An article based on this book, “Beyond Borlaug's Shadow: Octavio Paz, Indian Farmers, and the Challenge of Narrating the Green Revolution,” won the 2023 Best Article Prize from LASA, the Latin American Studies Association, Mexico Section.

I was inducted into the Academia Mexicana del la Historia in 2024 and that same year my first museum exhibit Measuring Difference opened at Harvard’s Collection of Historical and Scientific Instruments. The exhibit went on to win the 2024 Exhibiting Excellence Prize from the British Society of History of Science.

I explored some of my research questions as a fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin), as the 2019-20 AMIAS member at the Institute of Advanced Study (Princeton), the 2023-24 Dibner Distinguished Fellow in the History of Science and Technology at The Huntington (San Marino), and as a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at both the UC San Francisco School of Medicine (2001-2003) and in (2005-06) UW Madison (Department of History of Medicine and Bioethics) among other awards.

I’m currently working on Fertile Land/Polluted seas which seeks to link land and sea to retell histories of pollution in the Sea of Cortés and completing Sanitizing Rebellion which examines the role of physicians as both essential part of Mexico’s welfare state and social agitators demanding change.

Teaching and mentorship are a vital part of work. In 2019 I was awarded the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Graduate Mentoring Award and in 2025 I was the inaugural recipient of the Harvard Latino Faculty Mentorship Award presented by the Harvard Latino Alumni Alliance. I am the current co-editor of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine and sit on several editorial committees.

Select Publications:

Books:

• The World in a Wheat Field: Mexico, Science and the Challenge of Ending Global Hunger, UC Press, 2026 (November 2026).
• Laboratorios en la Selva: campesinos mexicanos, proyectos nacionales, y la creación de la píldora anticonceptiva. Fondo de Cultura Económica: Mexico City, 2020.
• Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National, Projects and the Making of the Pill.   Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.  Winner of Robert K. Merton Award

Select Articles:

• “CIMMYT’s Early Years: Rooted in Mexican Experience, Designed to Be International,” in CGIAR Histories, edited by Helen Anne Curry and Timothy Lorek. Accepted and forthcoming Spring 2024.
• “The Pole is Back,” in­ Empire, Colonialism, and the Human Sciences, Edited by Adam Warren, Julia Rodriguez and Stephen Casper, Accepted and forthcoming Fall 2024
• “Technology, Difference and Power: Sonoran Irrigation Canals and the Panama Canal as Sites of Erased Histories and Peoples” with Marixa Lasso in Dagmar Schafer et al Oxford History of Technology. Accepted & Forthcoming, Fall 2024.
• “Worker Once Known: Thinking with Disposable, Discarded, Mislabeled, and Precariously Employed Laborers in History of Science,” Isis 2023 114:4, 834-840.
• “Rogue Seeds in Disturbed Fields” Isis, volume 13, num 3, September 2022.
• “Poverty Alleviation from the Margins: Mexico’s COPLAMAR as a Challenge to 1980s Global Health and Economic Models” Hispanic American Historical Review. 102:4, Fall 2022: 673-704.
• “Of Canals, Rivers, and the Right to Exist: New(?) Methodological Tools for a Changed World,” Science, Technology and Society. (2022): 1-6.
• “Beyond Borlaug’s Shadow: Octavio Paz and Mexican Hybrid Seeds in India,” Agricultural History, Fall 2021 (95.4).
• “Doña Hermila: Zapotec Healer and Media Star,” in Diego Armus and Pablo Gomez, The Gray Zones of Healing. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021.
• "The socialist origins of the Green Revolution: Pandurang Khankhoje and domestic ‘technical assistance,’" History and Technology, 36:3-4, 2020: 337-359."
• (with Warwick Anderson, guest editors.) “Forum: Decolonizing Histories in Theory and Practice,” History and Theory: 59 (2020), 2.
• “Moving from, and Beyond, Invented Categories: Afterwords” History and Theory: 59 (2020), 2: 439-447.
• “Cold War Mexico in a Time of ‘Wonder Drugs,’” Anne-Emanuelle Birn and Raúl Necochea López in Peripheral Nerve: Health and Medicine in Cold War Latin America. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020:86-106.
• “Largo dislocare: connecting microhistories to remap and recenter histories of science,” History and Technology, 34:1, 2018: 21-30.
• “Epigenetics of Memory,” Kalfou: Special Issue on Race and Science. Volume 5, Issue 1 Spring 2018: 54-60.
• “Medicalizing the Borders of an Expanding State: Physicians Reporting from the Frontier of Mexican Progress, 1930-1950,” in W. I. Lee, John W.I. and Michael North Globalizing Borderlands Studies in Europe and North America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016.
• “Building the Nation of the Future, One Waiting Room at a Time: Hospitals in the Making of Modern Mexico,” History and Technology edited by John Krige and Jessica Wang, Volume 31, Issue 3, July 2015, pages 275-294.
• “Mexico’s Historical Solutions to Rural Health,” in Health for All the Journey to Universal Health Coverage. York: Center for Global Health Histories, 2015.
• “Shadowing the Professional Class: Reporting Fictions in Doctors’ Strikes” Special issue on secret service archives. Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, Summer 2013, 19:1, 30-40.
• "Searching for Molecules, Finding Rebellion: Echeverría's 'Arriba y Adelante'  Populism in Southeastern Mexico” in Populism in twentieth century Mexico : the presidencies of Lázaro Cárdenas and Luis Echeverría, edited by Amelia Kiddle and Maria Muñoz. Tucson: University of Arizona Press: 2010: pp. 87-105.

Articles In Progress:

• “When the Baker is the Knowledge Maker,” Article in Progress.
• “Technology, Difference and Power: Sonoran Irrigation Canals and the Panama Canal as Sites of Erased Histories and Peoples” in Dagmar Schafer et al Oxford History of Technology. Accepted & Forthcoming.
• “Invisible Labour: Power” in Jenny Bangham et al Invisible Labour. Accepted & Forthcoming. 

Select Talks/Lectures/Keynotes/Presentations

• History of Science Distinguished Lecture in the society’s Centennial in 2024
• Hawkins Lecture. Amherst College. March 24, 2022.
• Klopsteg Lecture at Northwestern University, February 28, 2022.
• Wellcome Lecture at the University of Cambridge, January 20, 2022.
• “Health Policies, Political Power, and Regime Change in 20th-Century Latin America,” comment. American Historical Association, January 2021.
• “‘Development’ Science in Latin America: Rethinking Hybrid Seeds and 20th Century Agro-technology,” American Historical Association, January 2021.

Select Fellowships & Awards

Curator for exhibit Measuring Difference, Collection for Historical and Scientific Objects -  Harvard. Oct 17, 2024 - August 26, 2025

• Exhibiting Excellence Prize from the British Society for History of Science for Curation of Measuring Difference museum exhibit at Harvard’s Collection of Historical and Scientific Instruments, 2025
• Elected to the Academia Mexicana de la Historia, 2024
• Huntington Library, Dibner Distinguished Fellow in the History of Science and Technology, 2023-2024
• Latin American Studies Association, Best Article in Social Sciences for "Beyond Borlaug’s Shadow" presented by the Mexico Section, 2023.
• Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Member for Academic year 2019-2020
• 2019 recipient of the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence In Mentoring Award
• Gerda Henkel Fellowship for Research Scholars, July 2015—January 2016
• Visiting Scholar - Max Planck Institute for History of Science, Berlin Aug. 1– Oct.1, 2015 and Jan.1 – Jan. 31, 2016, Group II
• 2016 UC Academic Senate Research Grant
• 2014 LAIS Outstanding Faculty Advisor
• 2014 Rockefeller Archive Center Grant
• 2010 Robert K. Merton Book Award  for Jungle Laboratories
• 2010 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship co-P.I.