Susana Arrechea works at New Sun Road, a Californian start-up incubated at the University of California at Berkeley (UCB), where she develops solar electrification and connectivity projects for rural Guatemala. She is the Project Director of the Digital Community Centres Stellar Ixq-Saq´e, funded by the US Agency for International Development-Microsoft. She holds a Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering earned at the University of San Carlos of Guatemala (USAC). She received a scholarship from Fundación Carolina, which allowed her to earn a Master of Science and a PhD degree in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology from the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, in Spain. She described more than 14 new organic molecules derived from porphyrins with applications in solar devices. In 2015, she was a Visiting Researcher at UCB, under the Fulbright NEXUS Program aimed at generating renewable energy. From 2016–2020, she was a Research Professor at USAC. In 2017, she won the Galardón de Guatemaltecos Ilustres award and received the TWAS Fellowships for Research and Advanced Training. In 2020, she won the OWSD-Elsevier Foundation Awards for Early-Career Women Scientists in the Developing World.

Fuentes Braeuner has been the director of the Centre for Environmental Studies and Biodiversity, Universidad del Valle de Guatemala (CEAB-UVG) since 2018. She is a PhD student in the Agriculture and Environment Programme, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Spain. She earned a postgraduate diploma in Water Resources Management at University of Canterbury, New Zealand (2013) and a master in business administration from ESI/York University (2011), Guatemala-USA. She started her scientific career as a forestry professional at the National Forest Institute (2010-2012), then she carried out research at CEAB-UVG (2014-2018) and served as a consultant for Rainforest Alliance (2018), and for the Sustainable Economic Observatory-UVG (2018-2019). She is a member of the National Climate Change Council, the Guatemalan System of Climate Change Science, Biodiversity and Climate Change and the Water Committee at UVG. In the last 6 years she focused mainly on mitigation of climate change and projects to avoid deforestation. As a government adviser on climate change, she has participated in three COPs of the UNFCCC, in 2015 in Paris, in 2016 in Marrakesh, and in 2019 in Madrid.