CAREER

Ikerbasque research professor working at the Basque Museum of the History of Medicine and Science of the UPV/EHU since 2009. The Ikerbasque Basque Foundation for Science was created by the Basque government in 2007 to promote research.

Academic degrees

Degree in Physics from the University of Barcelona (1991) and in Philosophy from the UNED (1996). Specialist in Registration and Administration of Archives, Museums and Historical Patrimony (Registro y Administración en Archivos, Bibliotecas, Museos y Patrimonio Histórico) from Deusto University (1999). Doctor in Physics from the UPV/EHU (2001).

Positions

He was a professor at Mondragon University (1992) and an assistant researcher in the Department of Physical Theory and History of Science of the UPV/EHU (1995-2002). He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Universities of Oxford (2002-2005), Sidney (2003), Toronto and Montreal (2004) and a Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2005) and the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington (2006). He was also a Visiting Professor at the Ateneo de Manila University (2011–2016) and the Instituto Superior de Tecnología y Ciencias Aplicadas of La Habana (2011), as well as a research fellow at the University of California in San Diego (2019), and Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (2020). He collaborated as a researcher with Eusko Ikaskuntza (2007–2008), the García Siñeríz Foundation in Madrid (2007) and the Spanish State Meteorology Agency (2011–2012).

Activities

He has participated in educational courses, seminars and congresses in many of those centers and other institutions and places.

His lines of research have mainly been: 1) History of geophysical sciences and industry; 2) the Jesuits and science; 3) networks and knowledge; and 4) Basque historical studies on science, industry and society.

He has directed 8 research projects and participated as a researcher in another 8. He is the individual author of 10 research monographs published in English and Spanish by distinguished publishing companies like Oxford University Press, Routledge, Ateneo de Manila University Press and the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. He authored more than twenty works published in international peer reviewed scientific journals, indexed in SJR and CiteScore, and entries in internationally renowned biographies and encyclopedias like New Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York, 2007) and Oxford Research Encyclopaedias. Climate Science (2018). From 2014 to 2018, he developed the research project Basques and the Philippines. Lives, Works and Ideas: A Selected Bio-bibliography, whose results were published by the National Historical Commission of the Philippines in 4 volumes. On Basque studies, he has also published the books Scientia in Vasconia. Ochenta biografías de cientificos e ingenieros vascos (Ttartalo, 2008) and La cadena vasca. Educación, poder social, tecnología y rendimiento industrial, 1776-1900 (Serbal, 2010), as well as more than a dozen of articles.

Awards

His career as a researcher has resulted in his being awarded the ‘Ritter Memorial Fellowship’ (2019) from the University of California and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He received an invitational Fellowship from the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science for (long-term) research at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (2020). In addition, his work Cyclones & Earthquakes: The Jesuits, Prediction, Trade, & Spanish Dominion in Cuba & the Philippines, 1850-1898 (Manila, 2017) won the ‘National Book Awards’ in the Philippines in the section for non-literary books (history). Finally, his work Wireless & Empire (Oxford University Press, 2009) was a finalist for the ‘2010 Marc-Auguste Pictet Prize’ organized by the Société de Physique et d’Histoire Naturelle of Geneva, which awards a prize every two years to a significant contribution to the history of science.