Scientific Talent, Racism, and Migration: Leandro Returns Home
Leandro could be the guy who discovers a treatment for a disease that afflicts premature babies worldwide. He is as capable of partying until dawn as he is of stepping onto the podium of a popular race without ever having trained. It is hard to keep a distance from someone who grew up with you, who is loved for his vitality, his easy‑going character, and simply because he is a great guy.
But he is not here for those reasons. This piece, based on his interview with Fuerteventura Digital in early September, tells the story of a young Majorero researcher who succeeded in the United States, built a family there, and has now returned home with a narrative that intertwines effort, perseverance, love, racism and migration.
A Scientist with a Majorero Soul
Leandro Castañeyra Ruiz grew up between Puerto del Rosario and La Laguna. He earned a degree in Biology, a PhD in Biomedicine and Biotechnology, and later completed a post‑doctoral fellowship and a research contract at the University of Washington in St. Louis (Missouri) starting in 2016. There he met and married Briana, and in 2021 moved to California to join the Children’s Hospital of Orange County (CHOC) with an even more attractive offer.
Now he has returned to the University of La Laguna through the Beatriz Galindo scientific‑talent‑recovery programme, which offers only about a hundred positions nationwide.
“I’m super excited. I’ve always been looking for a way to come back, and now I’ve made it happen,” he says, smiling.
During his U.S. career Leandro amassed roughly forty peer‑reviewed publications and close to a thousand citations—an exceptional record for his age. He founded two laboratories (in St. Louis and at CHOC) and secured more than US $2 million in research funding.
His work focuses on pediatric hydrocephalus, a condition that affects up to 50 % of premature infants who suffer severe intracerebral hemorrhage. Today the disease is treated “like a plumber”: a permanent catheter is implanted in the child’s skull to drain excess cerebrospinal fluid for life.
Leandro’s team has developed a drug candidate, calpeptin, an inhibitor of the enzyme calpain, which they hypothesise drives the inflammatory cascade leading to hydrocephalus. In mouse models, early administration of the inhibitor completely prevented the disease:
“Zero percent of the treated mice developed hydrocephalus, versus 40 % of untreated controls.”
The project attracted US $1.56 million from the U.S. Department of Defense because half of the babies born to service‑member families are premature. Leandro calls this “my biggest achievement.”
He also stresses that most of his U.S. funding is public, not private:
“The majority of my funding in the United States has been public. It’s a capitalist country, but they understand that knowledge is the foundation of the economy, and companies later develop products. Many breakthrough discoveries happen without profit motives, sustained by public money.”
According to Leandro, Europe is not fundamentally different; the distinction lies in the private sector’s ability to translate knowledge into commercial products. He notes that a large share of his grant money (about US $600,000) went to the host institution, and that when he announced his intention to return to Spain, his U.S. preferred to keep him on remote contracts rather than lose that funding.
He is also critical of the Trump administration’s cuts to research and health budgets, calling them “murderous”:
“I have five projects as principal investigator, and the two largest were funded with public money—taxpayer dollars. I know colleagues who won grants but never received the money. Cutting health and research ultimately leaves people without jobs, and the poorest or disabled may end up on the streets or die prematurely.”
USA vs. Europe
Leandro’s experience confirms the cliché of a heavily commercialised U.S. health system. He paid US $800 per month for health insurance that only covered expenses after a US $7,000 deductible. The births of his two children cost US $14,000, which the family finished paying three years later.
The family also faced social‑health challenges when their first child, who has autism, was repeatedly rejected from daycare because staff did not know how to support him. “Here, even if you have to wait, public health is always there. In the U.S., it isn’t. If public health disappears in Europe, we’ll be in big trouble,” he warns.
Leandro and Briana’s blended family now includes three children: Bentor and Lydia (their two children together) and Brandon, Briana’s son from a previous relationship. Brandon, a talented teenage footballer, has already been signed by Juventud Laguna in Tenerife.
Briana is Black and grew up in St. Louis—one of the twenty most violent U.S. cities—where “we often heard gunshots.” Although Leandro believes his son will stay out of trouble, he still asks Briana to have him greet local police whenever they arrive in a new place.
“They need to know who I am, ‘just in case,’” he has said repeatedly, expressing a genuine fear of being shot “just because of my skin colour.”
“I Spent Nine Months Without Working Because of Racism; They Ruined My Life”
The hardest episode of Leandro’s near‑decade in the United States stemmed from his status as a migrant. Although he held a researcher visa, the couple applied for a green card through marriage to gain more mobility.
During a trip to Spain to visit family and renew his passport, the immigration officer handling their case denied the green‑card application. Leandro recalls the officer’s hostile attitude:
“When we first went, she treated us terribly. I think she saw a Black woman with a Latino man and assumed we were ‘Mexicans from hell.’ When I asked if everything was okay, she stayed silent, and I’ll never forget that.”
Unaware that leaving the country would invalidate the application, Leandro later learned that the officer failed to inform them they could renew the student visa that had expired. He believes the officer acted illegally, deliberately withholding information because she knew the request would be denied.
“I spent nine months unable to work, and my university’s funding was frozen because of it. I fell into depression. Briana was pregnant. There were immigrant raids, and I was terrified to go outside. It was the worst period of my life.”
A similar bureaucratic hurdle awaited the family upon returning to the Canary Islands: despite Briana’s Spanish marriage, their three children, and a European contract with MasterCard, they endured an eight‑month waiting period that almost forced them back to the United States.
Leandro now issues a clear message:
“Racism is rhetoric. I suffered it in the U.S., and I see it here now. The same anti‑Latino chatter I heard in America is echoed in the Canary Islands about Moroccans. Migration does not bring crime; it brings wealth and wellbeing.”
This feature is the result of a collaboration between Fuerteventura Digital and Diario de Fuerteventura, originally published in the latter’s September 2025 edition.