Biographies of scientists | Física Eterna

Biographies

• Juan Ignacio Molina — He wrote the first natural history of Chile from Bologna, twelve thousand kilometres away, never able to return.
• Ignacio Domeyko Ancuta — He arrived in La Serena in 1838 on a six-year contract. He stayed fifty-one years, and completely reshaped how science was taught in Chile.
• Juan Noé Crevani — Chile was the first country in the Americas to eradicate malaria. He eradicated it.
• Alejandro Lipschütz Friedmann — Chile's first National Prize for Sciences. He proved basic research could be done here, then spent thirty years dismantling the concept of race.
• Héctor Croxatto Rezzio — He lived 102 years and published in "Science" and "Nature" when almost no one in Chile published anywhere.
• Grete Mostny Glaser — She arrived in Valparaíso in 1939 fleeing Nazism, with a doctorate in Egyptology and no plan. She ended up directing the National Museum of Natural History for eighteen years.
• Arturo Arias Suárez — He invented a way to measure how much damage an earthquake can do. It is called Arias Intensity and is used in every seismic region of the world.
• Cinna Lomnitz Aronsfrau — His doctoral thesis on how a rock deforms over time became the Lomnitz Law. He was the first director of the Institute of Geophysics of the Universidad de Chile.
• Mario Luxoro Mariani — He founded Chilean biophysics in a laboratory facing the sea, in Montemar, and from it came Cecilia Hidalgo, Ramón Latorre and Francisco Bezanilla.
• Fernando Mönckeberg Barros — In 1950, 180 of every thousand Chilean children died before turning one. Today seven do. Much of that difference bears his signature.
• Igor Saavedra Gatica — Before him, physics did not exist as a degree in Chile. He created it in 1960, then built almost every institution that sustains it.
• Miguel Kiwi Tichauer — He helped found the Department of Physics of the Universidad de Chile in 1965, and was still leading it half a century later.
• Pablo Valenzuela Valdés — He was on the team that made the first recombinant vaccine in history — for hepatitis B — and on the one that identified the hepatitis C virus.
• Mary T. Kalin Arroyo — She has spent almost fifty years studying how plants reproduce in the high mountains. Chile made her a citizen by special grace in 2022.
• Bernabé Santelices González — Chile has one of the most remarkable diversities of seaweed on the planet. He described it, and discovered two genera and ten species no one had seen before.
• Francisco Varela García — With Maturana he defined what it is to be alive. Then he spent thirty years asking what it is, exactly, to have an experience.
• Claudio Bunster Weitzman — In 1992 he found a black hole that theory said was impossible. Two years later he connected topology with thermodynamics.
• Juan Asenjo De Leuze — He took enzymes from the digestive system of Antarctic krill, had bacteria produce them, and patented them. Today they wash clothes in cold water.
• Guido Garay Brignardello — He is the world authority on how the most massive stars are born — the ones that live briefly and end in an explosion.
• Mónica Rubio López — With ALMA she found a stellar nursery in a dwarf galaxy three million light years away, under conditions where it should not exist.
• Leopoldo Infante Lira — The first Chilean to direct Las Campanas. In 2015 he found the most distant galaxy then known: its light left when the universe was 400 million years old.
• Jaime San Martín Aristegui — He has spent more than a decade fighting for Chile to have its own supercomputer, and along the way did front-line mathematics in probability.
• Dora Altbir Drullinsky — Third woman to win the National Prize for Exact Sciences, and the one who established nanoscience in Chile as a discipline with a home of its own.
• Pablo A. Marquet — He looks for the laws that govern ecosystems, in the same way physics looks for the ones that govern matter.
• Iván Eugenio Schmidt Andrade — The Chilean physicist who opened the doors of CERN to the country and trained an entire generation of theorists.
• Justicia Espada Acuña Mena — Chile and South America's first female civil engineer. A life built with calculations, bridges and a courage that never needed to announce itself.
• Olivier Rolando Espinosa Aldunate — Theoretical physicist, mathematician and pioneer of teaching innovation in Chile. Creator of the Balanced Polygamma Function and a driving force behind active learning at the UTFSM.
• Carmen Adelina Gutiérrez Alonso — The first Chilean woman astronomer, who taught the country to look at the stars.
• Eloísa Díaz Insunza — Chile and Latin America's first female physician; a pioneer who turned women's education into public health.
• María Teresa Ruiz González — Chilean astronomer, discoverer of Kelu-1 and the first woman to receive the National Prize for Exact Sciences.
• Claudio Gay Mouret — In 1830 Chile commissioned a newly arrived French teacher to survey the entire country and write it all down. It took forty years and thirty volumes.
• Rodulfo Amando Philippi Krumwilda — He directed the National Museum of Natural History for more than four decades and taught natural sciences in Chile, for the first time, by observing first and concluding afterwards.
• Ernestina Pérez Barahona — She graduated as a physician seven days after Eloísa Díaz, and spent the rest of her life proving that degree had not been an exception.
• Nibaldo Bahamonde Navarro — A teacher from Chiloé considered the founder of marine science research in Chile. Molluscs, crustaceans, fish and even a frog carry his surname.
• Humberto Maturana Romesín — He studied how a frog sees and ended up proposing that living beings make themselves. Autopoiesis left a biology laboratory and moved into philosophy, therapy and education.
• María Cecilia Hidalgo Tapia — First woman to earn a PhD in Sciences from the Universidad de Chile, and the first woman to win the National Prize for Natural Sciences. She has spent half a century studying what calcium does inside a neuron.
• Ramón Latorre de la Cruz — He showed that a cell membrane has gates, and spent fifty years working out how they open. He was the first Chilean elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences.
• José María Maza Sancho — He measured supernovae from Cerro Tololo for years, and that catalogue ended up being one of the pieces used to discover that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
• Mario Hamuy Wackenhut — He was principal investigator of the project that turned supernovae into a ruler for measuring the universe. He then put the telescope aside for a while to write the law that created the Ministry of Science.
• Servet Martínez Aguilera — A mathematical civil engineer who ended up chairing the Chilean Academy of Sciences, with the French Legion of Honour along the way and a laboratory devoted to the mathematics of the genome.
• Fabián Jaksic Andrade — The first ecologist to win the National Prize for Natural Sciences, and the one who made sure ecology in Chile split from environmentalism so it could be a science.
• Daly Noll — Describió la primera especie nueva de pingüino en más de un siglo, leyendo el ADN de colonias repartidas por todo el océano Austral.
• Pía Cortés-Zuleta — Lideró el hallazgo de una superTierra a 3,5 pársecs, en uno de los sistemas estelares más cercanos que existen.
• Nicolás Sandoval-Garrido — Encontró los canales por donde un cúmulo de estrellas en formación se alimenta desde afuera, y con eso una pista de cómo se ensambla.