Meet Jorge Serrano
A physicist committed to education
Jorge Serrano is a peculiar scientist: he has a solid background in materials physics and spectroscopy but at the same time, in education, emotional counseling and leadership. He feels that these two fields gave him the opportunity to become a better professor and scientific researcher. That’s why he’s been part of Yachay Tech twice now with two completely different roles.
He graduated from Physical Sciences at Universidad de Valladolid, Spain. He had very little opportunities to do experimental physics but was able to develop a passion for lasers. When he finished his graduation project, he found the courage to write to a Spanish scientist who was very well known in that area, just like him. This scientist worked at one of the Max Planck institutes in Germany. His attempts rendered great results: he had the opportunity to work and do his PhD at the Max Planck State for Solid State Research in Stuttgart. This was his one chance to learn what it meant to work at a laboratory, to have autonomy and to be constantly learning. Three months after he got his PhD he went to do a postdoc at École Polytechnique, in France. There, he changed the vision of what he wanted and started working on materials science. He then moved to Grenoble, France, where he was part of an international center dedicated to produce X-rays that can be used by different scientists for different experiments. Aside from working on his own research projects, he worked as a consultant for several researchers around the world for three years.
Talking about his first perceptions of materials and how they changed as he moved forward with his career is quite special for Jorge. He started feeling a connection with his surroundings and asked himself “how can I benefit the world with what I do?” He looked at and touched different materials before asking himself again “is there any usefulness of what I do in the “outside” world?” He went back to Spain to contribute to research in his country by working on metals and metallic fusions. At first materials were like a game, like using Legos to build something.
That was the base of his scientific training, but he still hadn’t had the opportunity to learn what being a professor was like. While in his country, he started teaching and realized there were students who didn’t know why they were taking his classes and were doing pretty bad in Physics, which intrigued and worried him. That’s when he decided he wanted to take a break from scientific research to take on education, consulting and motivation. He did 5 years of training in education, leadership, and personal and team coaching.
Jorge says that although scientists and academics specialize in something specific instead of exploring fields completely different to what they do, he realized that was not what he wanted. That’s why he expanded his fields of research from physics to things that were completely different. He says that you can do good research on just about anything. The main satisfaction you get from this is complementing your students’ education in a more comprehensive way.
That’s what he’s come to sow at Yachay Tech during his first stage as co-founder of the Innovation program, which serves as transversal learning axis at the University. “If we want to apply science to benefit society, we need some of our students to become entrepreneurs”, Serrano said. He is now starting his second round of courses as a Modern Physics Professor at the School of Physical Sciences and Nanotechnology. From an academic point of view, he expects to help students to receive a good training both professionally and personally. He feels that Yachay Tech is the right place to do so, as it means building a university from scratch, with a clear call for serve society and the correct people and resources to attract the best human talent nationally and internationally.
His main focus of research nowadays is to discover how the latest advances in neuroscience, especially in imaging, can be applied to develop learning environments that are suitable for a comprehensive development of human beings, both in educational and work settings. His current objective at YT is to teach his students that curiosity and having a purpose are key to becoming a good researcher. His passion lies on science, knowledge, curiosity and human’s learning capacity: today it is physics, tomorrow it could be anything else.
If you want to learn more about Jorge, take a look at his webpage or at Ranking Web of Universities, where he is ranked the 9th best scientist in Ecuador, according to Google Scholar.