Pursuing physics then, and now, in Latin America
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0381
One day in 1963, as a recent college graduate in Mexico City, Feliciano Sánchez Sinencio saw a poster advertising physics scholarships in Brazil. He applied. Within 10 days, he says, “I had a positive answer.” UNESCO—sponsor for a new funding body, the Centro Latino Americano de Fisica (CLAF)—awarded Sánchez a scholarship to pursue physics master’s degree in Rio de Janeiro. Early on, UNESCO paid for students’ plane tickets; today it acts as a legal adviser to CLAF. Fellowships are funded by Brazil’s National Council for Scientific and Technological Development and other sponsors.
At the time, Sánchez says, “Rio was just a point on the map. The CLAF was my salvation. A Latin American boy in the 1960s didn’t have many chances.” Sánchez eventually received his PhD in solid-state physics from the University of São Paolo.
An early beneficiary of CLAF, Sánchez eventually took the center’s reins. On 15 April he steps down from a four-year stint as director of the now-50-year-old CLAF. Physics Today spoke with him about his career and about CLAF, which is seeking a new director .
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PT PT: Why did you go into physics?
SÁNCHEZ SÁNCHEZ: My father was a physician. He had five kids. The first one decided to be a physician. I was the third one, and my father said he wanted me to learn to use my hands. Some engineer friends said, Why don’t you go with him to the Polytechnic [the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN), one of Mexico’s largest public universities]. I went there when I was 12 years old. After that, I spent three years there in high school and went there for my bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering.
PT PT: Why did you apply to study in Brazil?
SÁNCHEZ SÁNCHEZ: When I finished my [undergraduate] studies, I thought it would be interesting to continue, but we didn’t have any graduate-level physics or engineering in Mexico. Even in Brazil, when I finished my master’s, the results were published on the front page of the local newspaper. It was a different world.
PT PT: What were your next steps?
SÁNCHEZ SÁNCHEZ: CLAF got me a scholarship to pursue a PhD in France. But while I was in Mexico City for a few months, a Brazilian physicist, Sergio Mascarenhas, told me he had a Guggenheim fellowship, and was going to Princeton. I ended up going with him to Princeton for a year, and then back to Brazil to do my PhD.
I didn’t have an area yet. I made my master’s in solid state, but I didn’t feel like a solid-state man. Now I do, but at the time, I could have gone to any place, to do any physics.
PT PT: What is your area of research?
SÁNCHEZ SÁNCHEZ: The optical, electrical, and film-growing properties of II-VI compound semiconductors. Another thing I have looked at is corn grain transformation in tortillas.
I started to do research on the transformation process of corn grains into tortillas 20 years ago. Our research group has gotten 9 US patents, we have published around 50 research papers, and advised around 10 graduate and bachelor’s theses.
The Aztec recipe has three steps. Corn is boiled in water plus lime for 30 minutes and then left to steep, usually overnight. The grains obtained are ground to masa [dough]. The masa can then be pressed into tortillas. Now we know that calcium from the lime reacts with the lipids of the germ grain—the result is similar to the mix observed when soap is fabricated using animal fat and caustic soda—and that the chemical product is very important in the quality of the corn tortilla, and also that the process can be simplified. We have designed and built machines for the transformation of corn grain to corn powder useful in the instant production of tortillas.
PT PT: What was your own early CLAF experience?
SÁNCHEZ SÁNCHEZ: I was in the first group of graduate students supported by CLAF. It opened a great opportunity for my life. This was also fermented by colleagues—from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay. Those years were fantastic. And in those years, as soon as we got our degrees we were hired by institutions in our own countries. I joined the Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del IPN [the IPN’s Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Mexico City. So CLAF created the first group of physics researchers in Latin America.
PT PT: How does CLAF operate?
SÁNCHEZ SÁNCHEZ: The Latin American Center for Physics is a funding body that aims to promote and coordinate efforts in physics in Latin America. It was started 50 years with the help of the Brazilian government and UNESCO, and it is based in Rio de Janeiro. Fourteen Latin American countries are members and fund the organization.
The budget is about $1 million a year. Our main purpose is to promote people going from one country to another. In the last 50 years, CLAF has supported more than 500 students earning PhD degrees. We support scientific events like congresses. The main idea is to maintain interactions.
By the 1970s, when Latin American countries had already established their own capacities, CLAF supported the exchange of physicists and the creation of schools, working groups, and Latin American physics conferences. In the 1980s, CLAF gave its attention to multidisciplinary activities of regional interest—biophysics, chemical physics. In the 1990s, long-range programs and the use of large instrumental facilities were favored.
PT PT: What are the challenges for CLAF today?
SÁNCHEZ SÁNCHEZ: It is important to continue this work in an intense way. We need programs in Central America—Ecuador, Paraguay, and others. They have the same conditions that other Latin American countries had in the 1960s—that means they have nothing. Costa Rica is the only exception in Central America.
Another important challenge is to avoid brain drain. One approach is to train students in their own country, mixed with stints in some other country with more scientific development. Do not transplant them permanently. So a PhD student has two advisers, one in his own country, one in the other, and he alternates six months here, six months there. The idea is to train people and have them stay in their own country. CLAF has an agreement to fund such arrangements jointly with the ICTP [International Center for Theoretical Physics, based in Trieste, Italy].
Also, for me probably the most important discovery in the 20th century was the transistor. How do we do something equivalent in Latin America? What about if we define a problem we want to solve. A good number of scientists would like to do something significant. We can start with small problems. CLAF can help organize, and put the right people in contact with each other—scientists from universities and people from private enterprise. That is a big challenge for the next years.
CLAF has done a lot, but we need to do more. We need to have more money for scholarships, more money for collaborations among scientists.
More about the authors
Toni Feder, tfeder@aip.org
