The University of the Azores is welcoming American specialist Nadia Firdaus through the Fulbright Program for an initiative bringing together cancer survivorship, social work, Lifestyle Medicine and nature-based therapies. Developed with professor and researcher Eduardo Marques, “Wellbeing After Cancer – Co-Designing Lifestyle & Nature-Based Solutions” also turns São Miguel’s distinctive natural environment into a laboratory for new approaches to health and well-being.
Sometimes innovation in healthcare begins not with another machine or medication, but with a different understanding of where healing can take place. A trail through a forest, proximity to the sea, physical movement, restorative sleep and meaningful human relationships can become part of a broader conception of health. That philosophy is at the center of a new collaboration at the University of the Azores, where the Fulbright Program is helping connect American expertise with the islands’ growing work in community health and nature-based intervention.
American specialist Nadia Firdaus will be at the University of the Azores through September 25, working with the Social Work program and its community outreach activities. Together with Eduardo Marques, researcher, professor and director of the Social Work program, she has helped co-design “Wellbeing After Cancer,” an initiative focused on improving well-being and quality of life among cancer survivors. The project brings together public health, occupational therapy, rehabilitation and community health, drawing upon Firdaus’s experience developing interventions for people who have lived through cancer and creating synergies with the European Trans-Lighthouses project.
At its heart is an exchange between the Azores and the United States. Marques describes the Fulbright project as a “scientific, social and cultural dialogue” among professionals working in lifestyle and psychosocial well-being, grounded in clinical social-work intervention. Firdaus will contribute her experience in occupational therapy and cancer survivorship while becoming acquainted with approaches being developed in the Azores, including ForestMinds, a nature-based method in which Marques has particular expertise. The intention is not simply to import an American model, but to allow knowledge to move in both directions.
Lifestyle Medicine provides one of the project’s conceptual foundations. Marques identifies its principal pillars as healthy nutrition, regular physical activity, restorative sleep, stress management, positive social relationships and the reduction of risky behaviors. For cancer survivors, these elements can become part of rebuilding quality of life after treatment. The São Miguel pilot will therefore include the co-creation of evidence-based educational modules and a community workshop, together with a nature-based intervention allowing participants to experience ForestMinds strategies outside the conventional clinical setting.
The island itself is fundamental to the experiment. According to Marques, São Miguel’s particular geography and natural characteristics helped inspire the initiative. Forest environments and the sea offer opportunities to investigate how nature-based therapies might complement more conventional approaches to rehabilitation and psychosocial well-being. The longer-term ambition is to generate evidence capable of informing future public-health policies and forms of “social prescribing,” potentially extending similar approaches to other Azorean islands in partnership with local organizations.
Co-creation is particularly important. Rather than designing a program somewhere else and simply delivering it to cancer survivors, Marques explains that solutions are developed with participants before they are offered. The pilot therefore becomes an opportunity to test approaches, measure their impact and refine future interventions. It also places people who have experienced cancer not merely in the position of receiving services, but as contributors to the design of the support intended for them.
The two-week Fulbright collaboration includes scientific research, open classes, meetings with cancer survivors and social and cultural activities, some connected with the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the United States and open to the wider community. The partnership is also expected to continue beyond Firdaus’s visit. New collaborations involving European universities and pediatric cancer are already being discussed, while the concepts explored through the initiative have been incorporated into the Social Work Research Laboratory curriculum so that future Azorean social workers leave the University with what Marques describes as a broader professional “toolbox.”
That educational dimension may ultimately be one of the initiative’s most enduring contributions. Health does not exist only inside hospitals, just as social work does not end at the door of an institution. It exists in families and communities, in patterns of daily life, in social relationships—and perhaps also in the landscapes through which people move.
For an island university, there is something particularly fitting in turning geography into knowledge. São Miguel’s forests and ocean are usually understood as landscape, environment and heritage. This Fulbright partnership asks whether they might also become places of recovery.
And in that exchange between the Azores and the United States, nature itself enters the conversation—not as a substitute for medicine, but as another possible companion on the long journey back toward well-being.
Based on a story by journalist Diogo Simões Pires for Correio dos Açores, Natalino Viveiros, director. The Photos are also from CA.