Spanish visionary Pilar Mateo is snuffing out bug-borne diseases and the poverty behind them.

When Pilar Mateo earned her Ph.D. in chemistry years ago, she planned to join her father’s paint company in her native Valencia, Spain. Her goals were admirable but not necessarily world-changing : develop better, more durable paints and live a charitable life helping others in her local community. It never dawned on her that house paint might be the key to something so life-altering as curbing diseases around the world, or that helping others might mean tackling something really big, like ending poverty.