As a member of the InterAmerican Heart Foundation, Beatriz is dedicated to the prevention and control of non-communicable diseases or NCDs, heart diseases and stroke in the Americas. She helped found her organization and was Executive Director from 1995 to 2017. She continues her active engagement with a focus on advocacy.
Beatriz’s contributions include advocacy to promote and defend policies supporting good nutrition, physical activity, control of tobacco and alcohol. She organized and has led the Healthy Latin America Coalition (CLAS) that has more than 300 member organizations in the region and has been instrumental in presenting a coherent response from civil society to issues arising nationally and internationally. She advocates for salt reduction in the region as part of the “Scaling up Salt Reduction Consortium.”
In tobacco control she set up the first tobacco control virtual network in Latin America and a separate one in the Caribbean. She organized many capacity building workshops to promote effective tobacco control policies including smokefree environments and tobacco warning labels. She supported tobacco warning labels research in the Caribbean and Central America resulting in a compendium of tested well-tailored warning labels for this region. She organized 7 journalism contests and awards. In smoking cessation, Beatriz worked to implement WHO guidelines including supporting national planning, training and networking of health professionals. She was a Principal Investigator of the CARMELA study of CV risk factor prevalence in seven Latin American cities; and co-Principal Investigator of the NIH funded “From production to retailing: policy-oriented research on tobacco economy in Argentina.” Beatriz was president and main organizer of five Latin American and Caribbean Tobacco or Health Conferences that took place in Rio de Janeiro; Mexico City; Lima, Peru; San Jose, Costa Rica; and Montevideo, Uruguay. She also supported economic studies in Central America in preparation for tobacco taxation.
Her organization received the 2009 Luther L. Terry Awards for Exemplary Leadership in Tobacco Control. The CLAS coalition received the 2017 Sharjah Award for Excellence in NCD Civil Society Action for its initiative “Rapid Regional Response to Strengthen and Defend National NCD Policies”. More recently she received the 2018 WHO World No Tobacco Day Award.
She holds a Master of Science and Ph.D. from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, and a Bachelor of Science summa cum laude from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. She was born and spend her formative years in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
