Alberto Sánchez will lead Cinvestav for the next 4 years

The Ministry of Public Education (SEP) appointed Dr. Alberto Sanchez Hernandez as the new director of the Center for Research and Advanced Studies (Cinvestav) for the period 2022-2026. Through an act chaired by Luciano Concheiro Borquezundersecretary of said institution, the baton was handed over to the researcher, who pointed out that throughout his life he has faced various challenges, which he overcame with work and effort, for which he said he had full confidence in the assignment to direct Cinvestav, to the have the collaboration of the community of the Center.

The Cinvestav It was created in 1961 by presidential decree, as a decentralized public body with its own legal personality and assets. Its founder is Dr. Arturo Rosenblueth and it has 28 research departments that are distributed in nine campuses throughout the Mexican Republic.

The Center is cataloged in Mexico as the first research institution, in Latin America it is positioned among the top three or four places, depending on the ranking that is seen and in the world at number 100 approximately.

In his message to the new director, Concheiro Bórquez said that research centers must carry out scientific work from a human and social perspective that responds to the complexity of today’s world, for which a multidisciplinary and gender approach is required.

This coincides with the work platform proposed by Sánchez Hernández, who assures that he will prioritize actions that help reduce gender inequality, as well as reinforce protocols to promote an environment free of violence. In the same way, it proposes actions to increase postgraduate enrollment, and fully comply with the mission for which the Center was created, “to carry out scientific and technological research of the highest quality and train highly trained master’s and doctoral students.”

In his speech during the swearing-in, Sánchez Hernández said that “the Cinvestav It has contributed to the training of researchers who have played a fundamental role in the development of other educational, research or relevant institutions in activities of the industrial sector”. In addition, the Center has generated projects to solve national problems and has been involved in high-impact international studies.

However, he assured that in order to fulfill this mission it is necessary to update the development plans and check whether the lines of investigation are in line with our times. “This in order to keep the Center as a leader and attract the best national and international researchers.”

He added that another of the priorities is to redouble efforts in order to identify early the studies that could be susceptible to an application with economic or social impact.

Big challenges ahead

Today at Cinvestav there are 66 programs and 36 of them have the category of International Competition, according to the extinct Conacyt National Quality Postgraduate Program. Throughout its history it has graduated 16,000 people, but there are great challenges ahead, since Sánchez Hernández assumes the position with the challenge of increasing the enrollment of postgraduate students, which in the last 10 years has dropped almost 25%; renew the plant of researchers, of which around 15% are already over 70 years of age; and reduce gender inequality, since today only 25% of researchers are women.

In addition to updating their training plans and research programs, they will have to renew their research staff, and work with a budget of just over 2,700 million pesos. In this sense, it will be important for the new leader to seek new forms of financing. , because as happens in other countries, the resources come mainly from the private initiative.

Who is Alberto Sanchez Hernandez?

He is a Doctor of Science from the Physics Department of the Cinvestav, dedicates his study to proton-proton interactions, with special emphasis on high-precision measurements in the b quark sector of the Standard Model, including the understanding of the mechanisms that govern the formation of hadrons and, especially, the formation of states from “quarkonium”. This led him to be the first researcher from a Mexican institution to have presented his results on the subject of particle physics at the prestigious European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN).

He completed his bachelor’s degree at the Higher School of Physics and Mathematics of the National Polytechnic Institute, and then completed his master’s and doctorate at the physics department of the Cinvestav. In 1999, after completing his postgraduate studies, he joined the Cinvestav academic staff as Senior Researcher in the Department of Physics, where he has reached the 3-D academic category. Since June 2019, he has been in charge of the Office of the Head of the Department.

He is currently a member of the National System of Researchers level III and of the Mexican Academy of Sciences, he is also part of the collaboration of the Compact Muon Solenoid CMS experiment of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where he joined in 2005, being responsible for the development of the PhEDEx tool, which was used to transfer data between the participating institutions during “Run 1 and 2”.

Sánchez Hernández has published more than 1,500 research articles in internationally prestigious specialized journals, including those in which he signed as a member of the DZero, Focus and CMS collaborations. In addition, he is a referee for the magazine The European Physics Journal C since 2019. Among the awards that he has been awarded for his scientific or academic work, the SCOPUS 2013 Prize awarded by Elsevier-Conacyt stands out, where they recognized “his valuable commitment and contribution to the promotion and development of Mexican science in the area of ​​Physics -Mathematics and Earth Sciences”.

nelly.toche@eleconomista.mx

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