David Hughes
Dr. David H. Hughes is a senior researcher in the Department of Astrophysics at the Mexican National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics (INAOE). He received his Ph.D. in Astrophysics from the University of Central Lancashire, England in 1990. Following post-doctoral studies at the Universities of Oxford and Edinburgh, he moved to Mexico in 1999 to contribute to the advancement of millimeter-wavelength astronomy and the technical and scientific development of the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano (LMT) and its instrumentation program.
Since 2011 he has served as the binational (Mexico/USA) Director of the LMT. He has published more than 230 peer-reviewed papers related to the formation and evolution of galaxies and their active nuclei. He is a co-discoverer of the “sub-millimeter galaxy population, SMGs” that represents the most massive and active star-forming galaxies that exist in the early universe. He is a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and has been awarded a number of national recognitions including the Mexican Puebla State Luis Rivera Terrazas prize for Science and Technology in 2019.
Dr. Hughes is currently the vice-Chair of the governing Board of the global Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration and the leader of the Mexican participation in the EHT project. In April 2019, the EHT collaboration presented the first image of the shadow (the event horizon) of a supermassive black hole which received wide worldwide recognition by the public sector and the international scientific community. As a member of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, Dr. Hughes has been the recipient of multiple international honors including the Breakthrough Prize 2020 in Fundamental Physics, Royal Astronomical Society Group Award 2020, Einstein Medal 2020, American Astronomical Society Bruno Rossi Prize 2020 and the National Science Foundation Diamond Achievement Award 2019
Xyoli Perez
Dr. Xyoli was coordinator of the National Seismological Service of UNAM from 2014 to 2021. From 2008 to 2010 she served as technical representative of Mexico before the UN Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization. She was part of the board of directors of the Mexican Geophysical Union, being her president in the period 2016-2017.
She currently works as Senior Researcher in the Department of Seismology, studying the seismic structure of the subduction zone, the Northwest and Mexico City, as well as the characteristics of the source of Mexican earthquakes. She belongs to the National System of Researchers. She is a member of the board of directors of the Seismological Society of America and the Seismological Commission of Latin America and the Caribbean; as well as the Scientific Advisory Committee on Disturbing Geological Phenomena of the National Civil Protection System.
Gerardo F. Torres del Castillo
Prof. Gerardo has published more than 170 research articles, 70 of them about Classical Mechanics. Recently, Springer Science+Business Media recognized that his book “Differentiable Manifolds”, published in 2012, is one of the most consulted texts in the field of mathematics, with more than 14600 downloads on his website.
In 1991, Prof. Torres received the Academic Medal awarded by the Mexican Society of Physics. In 1996, he obtained the Science Prize for Young Researchers from the Academy of Scientific Research in the area of Exact Sciences. In 2008, the Polytechnic University of Puebla instituted an award with his name.
Erica Caden
Dr. Caden completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Laurentian University working on calibration source shielding and hardware development for SNO+. As a Research Scientist at SNOLAB, she works on the SNO+, HALO, and nEXO experiments. Dr. Caden was the SNO+ detector manager until 2019, leading the everyday working of the experiment through its initial commissioning and water-physics phase. She currently serves on many internal committees for both SNO+ and nEXO, as well as on the Science Council for the Institute of Particle Physics in Canada.
One of Dr. Caden’s long-time passions is science communication, and she had created many art projects used to explain complex physics concepts. She is the Teaching Director for The GIRLS Initiative, a summer camp program she co-founded to encourage young girls to study science. Dr. Caden was recognized as one of Sudbury, Ontario, Canada’s young community leaders with a “40 under Forty” award in 2019, and as one of Drexel University’s “40 under 40″ outstanding alumni in 2020.
Víctor Manuel Romero Rochín
Dr. Romero’s areas of expertise are those in quantum physics and thermodynamics. He is a member of the Institute of Radio Astronomy and Astrophysics and the Institute of Materials Research, both part of UNAM. From 1999 to 2003 he functioned as Chief of the Department of Complex Systems at IFUNAM.
His efforts as an educator have contributed in the development of countless PhD graduates, but also in the achievement of multiple laureates in the International Physics Olympiad. He has published 90 articles, which has been cited over 1200 times overseas; among the awards and prizes he has received for himself are the National University Distinction for Young Academics, the Research in Exact Sciences Prize and the Mexican Society of Physics Prize to Scientific Research. Pie de foto: He received his PhD degree in Physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by developing a thesis about Brownian motion and weak coupling in classical and quantum systems.
Cecilia Noguez
Dr. Cecilia is a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and the National System of Researchers. Dr. Noguez is the current director of the Institute of Physics of UNAM. She is a leader in computational physics, recognized for her contributions in the fields of plasmonics, optical activity and surface physics. She pioneered the study of plasmonic nanoparticles, which allowed establishing new concepts and lines of research.
She is the co-author of numerous publications in specialized journals, which have been widely accepted by the scientific community. She has given more than 200 invited lectures at congresses, universities and research centers in Europe, the United States, Canada, Latin America, Australia, China and Mexico. She has received numerous awards, among the most recent are the 2016 National Science Award for her contribution to the country’s scientific heritage and the Honoris Causa Doctorate from the Autonomous University of Edo. de México in 2018.
Tonatiuh Matos Chassin
Dr. Tonatiuh is member of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration. In 1992, he served as a Founder Vice-president of the Division of Gravitation and Mathematical Physics of the Mexican Society of Physics, three years later he functioned as the President of that same division. Since 2019 he been serving as a President of the Mexican Society of Physics.
In the areas of scientific dissemination, he’s been an organizer of 37 national and international conferences in gravitation, astrophysics and cosmology; as a guest speaker he’s been part of more than 150 conferences, of which 50 have been international.
In scholar subjects he has supervised 16 doctoral theses, two of them got the Arturo Rosenblueth award and other the Weizmann award from Israel and the AMC, for the best doctoral thesis. Also, their PhD students have supervised 30 PhD theses, two are Weizmann award as well.
Ivette Fuentes
Dr. Fuentes work in theoretical physics aims at finding grounds where quantum and relativistic effects can coexist in a compatible way. She applies novel techniques from information theory and metrology to find ways for quantum matter to explore the underlying spacetime.
She obtained her bachelor’s degree in physics from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and her PhD from Imperial College, London (UK) and held academic positions at the University of Oxford (UK), Perimeter Institute (Canada), Technical University Berlin (Germany) and University of Nottingham (UK). She has worked with the expressionist artist Benjamin Arizmendi on an art – science project entitled “The Aesthetics of Entanglement”.
Eric Vázquez Jáuregui
In 2009, Dr. Eric obtained a recognized postdoctoral position at the SNOLAB laboratory in Sudbury, Canada, where he was appointed as researcher in 2014.
Since 2015 he is a researcher at the UNAM Institute of Physics (IFUNAM) and adjunct professor at the Laurentian University of Canada. His research focuses on the properties of neutrinos and the search for dark matter by direct detection inside the SNOLAB underground laboratory in Canada, two kilometers below the surface. Dr. Vázquez is also the leader and founder of the DM (Dark Matter-neutrinos) laboratory for instrumentation and detectors of neutrinos and dark matter. He participates in various committees in SNOLAB and in the development of an underground research laboratory in the state of Hidalgo, near Mineral el Chico.