Leonor Gutiérrez Fernández is TeenSmart’s Executive Director and a self-motivated Costa Rican woman both in and outside work. Having found herself in an environment whereby she has to utilise her knowledge and skills in project design, management and research evaluation. Her extensive exposure and experience was greatly enhanced whilst working in the field of primary adolescent promotion at individual and community level. TeenSmart´s current achievements can speak for themselves, such as the realisation of the TeenSmart web-based e-learning curriculum in 20 diverse organisations in Costa Rica, Nicargua and Honduras (i.e., 5 public schools of over 3000 students, 5 church groups, 4 public libraries, 1 university, 5 technological community centers), she believes that further development can only enhance and add value to an individual’s quality of life, and that TeenSmart tools can coach teens to be more proactive a self confident. In coordinating the Joven Salud initiative, she hopes to envision the expansion of virtual risk prevention and health promotion services to all teenage Costa Rican population and incrementally to all Central America to be valued as a gradual and steady organic progress. She was awarded the Erasmus Mundus postgraduate scholarship that allowed her to further her studies in Public Health at the University of Sheffield (United Kingdom) as well as in the field of Social and Health Protection at the Jagellonian University (Poland). Living, learning and teaching abroad was a valuable and rewarding experience in many ways. The daily interaction with students and locals required a level of empathy and sensitivity and made it necessary to recognise different beliefs, attitudes, values, expectations and behaviour to preserve equilibrium of mutual respect.