Interdisciplinary UW-Eau Claire research team takes on global violence against women

For senior Latin American studies major Avery Dresel, that search led to a 2025 summer research collaboration in Argentina and the chance to present her study to the Council on Internationalization and Global Engagement this fall, along with upcoming presentations next April at UW-Eau Claire's Celebration of Excellence in Research and Creative Activity.

Those are valuable outcomes for a summer research opportunity — outcomes that Dresel says went beyond what she’d hoped to gain.

A long-awaited research project reboot

As her last summer as an undergraduate approached, Dresel took the advice to seek out a unique opportunity, and she knew exactly where to turn.

“I reached out to our campus immersion program coordinator and my previous geography professor, Dr. Jeff DeGrave, asking about research or other activities for summer 2025,” the Chisago City, Minnesota, native says. 

As a minor in geography who took part in a 2024 immersion in Guatemala led by DeGrave, she knew he would be a great place to start.

“It was great timing for Avery to check in, because I had a perfect project for her to consider,” DeGrave says.

In DeGrave’s eyes, Dresel seemed like an ideal student to help complete a past student-faculty research collaboration that had been sidelined by COVID and political unrest in previous immersion host countries. The original project had been titled “Preventing Sexual Assault through Geospatial Technology.”

Through a 2018 conversation with Noelia Corrales, a UW-Eau Claire immersion partner in Nicaragua, DeGrave moved forward with the idea of creating a smartphone app to help prosecute instances of sexual assault. At the time, Nicaragua was one of 14 Latin American countries listed among the world’s 25 worst for sexual violence against women. The pair wondered if geography mapping technologies could be used to improve outcomes for victims seeking help in those parts of the world.

Dresel was eager to step up to the plate in this type of project.

“I felt very grateful to be offered the opportunity to join the project. It’s a project that combines a lot of my interests, and traveling to Argentina to work on this project provided an incredible out-of-classroom opportunity to observe and practice so much of what I’ve learned in the classroom at UWEC. It was an amazing eye-opening experience that kicked off my final year as an undergraduate,” Dresel says.

“I’d hoped to get back to this project and Avery’s skills have been a great match to move the work forward,” DeGrave says. “It’s amazing to see where she has taken the efforts we started years ago.”

Bringing the project to the final steps

Although a fully operational mobile app is yet to come, the project prototype is an online platform that can document and store critical information with the potential be used in a legal case or memorialize an incident for whatever purpose a victim might have in a subsequent healing process. Entries into the database would record data such as the exact location, date, time and possibly related videos or photos.

“Our work partnered with the Universidad de Congreso in Mendoza, Argentina,” Dresel says. “We worked with campus representatives and past collaborators there, along with local Argentine human rights organizations and research groups. Our main priority was to give voice to Argentine people to ensure that if we are creating this product, it will be useful and will meet the needs as they see them.”

Dresel’s summer experience was funded through the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs in the form of a Summer Research Experiences for Undergraduates grant. The summer collaboration with DeGrave culminated in a two-week visit to Argentina for important beta testing of the application.

The Argentine and UW-Eau Claire team created multiple focus groups to test the application in smartphones and computers, looking for input on everything, including the look and feel of the digital platform, how the application icon or logo should appear, connectivity and logistical issues for use in various locations and settings, checking for obvious technical bugs and more.

Dresel says that while the technology gains of the testing in Argentina were critical, she feels most proud of the ways in which their process honored the voices and opinions from the local people who will be using the application.

“We prioritized their voices, opinions and critiques because that was the most important part on a project such as this,” Dresel says.

The next steps are to take the testing feedback and move the technology from an online prototype to a functioning application, a phase that requires software development expertise for which DeGrave has turned to faculty and students in the UW-Eau Claire computer science department.

International project now interdisciplinary as well

DeGrave says he has understood for years this project would eventually need significant help in the final phases of the technology — help he was quite certain he would find in UW-Eau Claire’s computer science department.

“I went to our colleagues in computer science with no particular ask, as we were open to their ideas of how best to lend their student and faculty expertise to our project,” DeGrave says. “Dr. Rahul Gomes and Dr. Benjamin Fine have come up with a wonderful solution that will incorporate a spring capstone course through the computer science department, giving talented and eager Blugolds degree credit for final development of the mobile application.”

Expanding the scope of this project is in keeping with UW-Eau Claire’s tradition of promoting interdisciplinary research opportunities. Gomes, associate professor of computer science, says this new capstone is a win for all involved, not the least of which being potential global users of the technology.

“This collaboration highlights the interdisciplinary strength of UW-Eau Claire’s approach to research and teaching,” Gomes says.

“The project brings together students and faculty from computer science, biomedical engineering and Spanish/Latin American studies, each contributing a different perspective rooted in technical implementation, human-centered design and cross-cultural communication.”

He explains that the computer science students will work alongside their peers from other majors to translate community-based feedback from Argentina into tangible software improvements, ensuring that the app remains both functional and culturally sensitive.

DeGrave has also added a second primary student researcher to the efforts. Rosana Fernandez Vila, a junior biomedical engineering major from Valencia, Spain, has joined the project with an interest in analyzing coding, creating mobile apps and lending her native language in translating the app from English to Spanish.

“Coming from another country, it makes me happy to see how this kind of project can have an impact on people all over the world,” Fernandez Vila says.

“The idea that this app could help someone communicate important information or report a sensitive situation, like sexual abuse, makes the work feel very meaningful,” she says.

This sentiment is echoed by Gomes as he points out the importance of cross-disciplinary collaborations.

“It is a powerful example of how Blugolds learn to turn their technical and cultural knowledge into tools for a meaningful global impact,” Gomes says.

For DeGrave, seeing this once-abandoned research project now on the verge of crossing the finish line and becoming a viable product in 2026 is gratifying for many reasons.

“The human issues in the countries where we take our students for immersion programs become very important to me, and not just academically. These are heavy issues,” DeGrave says. “An idea about a way to help people that was pulled through immersion programming in four Latin American countries and is now making its way to an interdisciplinary technological reality on this campus — it’s a great research success story for our students and for our international partners.”

Top image caption: The research team, from left: Senior Avery Dresel, Dr. Jeff DeGrave, junior Rosana Fernandez Vila and Dr. Rahul Gomes.