About Jorge A. López
Jorge Alberto López Gallardo was born in Monterrey, Nuevo León, México, but at the age of 2 years he realized that Monterrey was not the town for him and moved to Ciudad Juárez, México, on the U.S.-Mexico border. He grew under the care of his maternal grandmother and three aunts who worked for more than 30 years at a Levi Strauss plant in El Paso, Texas. Jorge's parents and brothers and sisters remained in Monterrey, over 1,100 kilometers away, in El Paso Jorge had several uncles and cousins, plus a few more relatives in Los Angeles, California.
Jorge began toying with physics when he was in 3rd grade of his elementary school, Colegio Bernal, in Ciudad Juárez. Following instructions from his government-provided textbooks, he sometimes produced electricity with zinc, copper and rock salt, sometimes got asphyxiated with ammonia, or burned his eye brows and lashes with exploding alcohol fumes. In 4th grade he transferred to El Colegio de Las Americas; besides him, at least two other students from that school have become professors in U.S. Universities.
He attended a technical middle school (ETIC 97), specialized in technical drafting and had three years of math, one year of biology, chemistry and physics, respectively. To his good luck, he was “adopted” by his math and physics teacher, Roberto Díaz Molina, as his “favorite slave”, with duties such as cleaning the blackboard, carrying his teaching utensils, and grading homework; Mr. Díaz Molina was an extreme science buff to the point that he named his children with names of chemical elements (Helio and Argenta). The close attention of his teacher and the linear response of nature made Jorge feel that he was able to understand physics. It is interesting to note that Jorge flunked chemistry due to lack of preparation for the final exam, and had to take a remedial exam in the summer (which he aced with a 95, on purpose, as he did not want to be "perfect"). Also of interest is that, in his final year, several teachers signed a petition to expel Jorge from the school for disrupting behavior; luckily he had one of the best grades of his generation and was pardoned. By the end of his middle school years, at age 15, Jorge had decided to study physics, against the opinion of his school counselor who knew that there were no physics careers in Ciudad Juárez nor in the State of Chihuahua.
Jorge enrolled in the technical preparatory school of the Instituto Tecnológico Regional de Ciudad Juárez (ITRCJ), which was a technical university, and completed high school studies in an accelerated 2-year program learning heavy doses of physics, chemistry, calculus and his trade, mache tools. To his good luck, two of his instructors were Physics M.S. students at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) and introduced Jorge to the professional aspects of the field; in particular, Jesús Roberto Armijo took the high school group to visit UTEP, and had the patience to talk to Jorge about antimatter, cosmology, etc. Again, it is interesting to note that Jorge, in spite of having the second best average in the physics class, did not prepare for the final exam, flunked it, and had to take a remedial exam in the summer. [Jorge tried to get out of the extra work by offering his teacher Hortencia Licón, to show that Galileo was wrong in his conclusions of the Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment; but she didn't accept the offer.]
After high school he continued in the ITRCJ and began to study Industrial Engineering, but as he participated in the organization of a student strike to demand full time instructors, he was expelled and blackballed in all of the Mexican universities of the region. Without any other option, Jorge remembered his visit to UTEP, and decided to enroll there to study physics. After a year and a half, Jorge was allowed to enroll back in the Mexican Engineering school, and he decided to study both physics and engineering. Transferring engineering credits to UTEP he managed to earn a physics B.S. degree in 3.5 years without taking any summer courses. After that, he continued with MS studies in physics, but decided to stop his engineering career. His M.S. thesis advisor, Dr. Alan Eugene Dean, used his work to write an article that has over 400 citations. After earning his MS in physics at UTEP, he married Rosa Elena Fierro Coronado, and both moved to College Station in central Texas to enroll at Texas A&M University for a PhD in Physics (Jorge), and Blinn College (Rosa) to initiate a BS in Computer Science.
After one year at TAMU Jorge approved the qualifying exams (the only one out of a group of eleven students) and, by the end of his second year, began his thesis work with Dr. Phillip Siemens, one of the selected group of students advised by Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe. Jorge worked with Siemens as a research assistant for a period of four years at TAMU’s Cyclotron Institute and completed two research projects, each of which could have served as his dissertation. He published several articles before graduating, gave talks in international meetings in Mexico and at Gordon Conferences. His thesis became infamously famous when the “Lopez conjecture” of the instability of the vacuum prompted a special session in a national conference to verify his results. Nine months before graduating, Lopez left for a postdoctoral position at the prestigious Niels Bohr Institute; he graduated in absentia in May 1986, and in absentia received the $500 Best Thesis Award of TAMU. [Jorge could have graduated in Dec. 1985, but he misspelled the word "Chiuahua" and had to make corrections by hand, on paper, with the same font, and by mail from Europe.]
At the Niels Bohr Institute (NBI) he worked with Jacob Bondorf from 1985 to 1987 on nuclear fragmentation, and collaborated with colleagues from Denmark (K. Sneppen), East Germany (H.W. Barz, H. Schulz), Estonia (E. Saar), France (C. Guet), Spain (V. Martínez), and the UK (B. Jones). It was during those two years that Jorge made his first incursion into astrophysics and general-audience writing, publishing several articles in Spanish newspapers. Jorge and Rosa’s daughter, María Isabel, was born in Kobenhavn in 1987. Jorge participated in conferences and seminars in Norway, Sweden, Italy, Hungary and East and West Germany.
During his second year at NBI, Jørgen Randrup asked him if he would be interested on a second postdoc at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab (LBL) and, after asking for a “few days” to think it over, Jorge accepted. [“What is there to think? It’s Berkeley!" Randrup told him.] From 1987 to 1989 Jorge was a member of the Nuclear Theory Group of LBL. While crafting the theory of multifragmentation, Jorge and Rosa had a son, Oscar, in 1988. During this period Jorge published extensively, gave several talks at universities and national conferences. It was there where he met his life-long colleague, Claudio Dorso. Jorge applied and received offers of employment as Assistant Professor from institutions in California and Texas, and accepted the one from CalPoly State University in San Luis Obispo, CA, just a few hours driving-time south of Berkeley.
In his first and only year at CalPoly, Jorge received both the Meritorious Performance and Professional Promise Award, and the Affirmative Action Faculty Development Program Award. But decided to cut his Californian career short when he received an unsolicited offer from his alma mater, UTEP. As he learned later, Jorge’s CV had been sent to Ray Elizondo, then Dean of UTEP’s College of Science, via the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) networking, who hired him in 1990 as an Assistant Professor at UTEP. Jorge and family left California (and their newly-purchased house) to go back to their families on the border.
In a nutshell, Jorge applied for early tenure in 1993, became Assistant Dean of the College of Science in 1999, Full Professor in 2000, and was asked to chair the Physics Department in 2001, position he held until 2009, when he stepped down. While in administration, Jorge played key roles in establishing bridge positions with national labs, increased substantially the number of Hispanic and female faculty, and diversified the department into new research areas such as astronomy and medical physics.
With respect to research, Jorge continued studying nuclear reactions at intermediate energies, developing models with increased complexity. He made progress on the study of neutron-rich nuclei through isoscaling (years 2000-2010), the nuclear phase diagram, the nuclear pasta (years 2010-2020), and many other related topics. Jorge was asked by World Scientific to write a book on the topic (“Lecture Notes on Phase Transitions in Nuclear Matter”), which was published in 2000. In 2021 Jorge finished a review article of over 80 pages on the topic of neutron star crusts, by invitation of the Editor of the journal Symmetry.
In the field of materials science Jorge saw the opportunity to upgrade an old surface physics laboratory, and obtained funds to renovate experimental ESCA equipment (ESCA stands for Electron Spectroscopy for Chemical Analysis). In 2017, Jorge received funding from the Department of Defense to expand the laboratory with more equipment and continue training students, many students have worked with Jorge in this field, and most of them are in industry, government and academic positions. In 2013 Jorge wrote the book “Surface Spectroscopy for Engineers and Scientists.”
Jorge has also performed research on gravity waves with funding from the Jet Propulsion Lab, had summer visits to Argonne National Lab (1995) and to the Lawrence Berkeley Lab (1992, 1993, 2012, 2013 and 2014); many of these visits were accompanied with undergraduate students. Other fields of Jorge’s interest are studies of electoral data, migration, and political science, areas in which he has written several books and articles.
A strong interest of Jorge is the education of Hispanics, Mexicans and latrin Americans, as well as the development of physics in Latin America. In the U.S.A. Jorge, along with Carlos Ordoñez (U. Houston) and David Ernst (Vanderbilt U.) obtained funding to organize the creation of the National Society of Hispanic Physicists. At APS he chaired the Committee on Minorities, and is a member of the Forum of International Physics. In Latin America, Jorge has visited dozens of universities in Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Uruguay, Venezuela to incite collaborations and to recruit students for UTEP's M.S. Physics program. He is one of the founding members of the Latin-American Symposium on Nuclear Physics and Applications, and is a member of ALAFNA. In Mexico, he is a founding member of the Division of Radiation Physics of the Mexican Society of Physics and was its President from 2015-2017, he is also a member of the Division of Nuclear Physics, and of the Accreditation Committee of Educational Physics Programs (CAPEF).
The only hesitation Jorge had before coming back to El Paso, was the difference in educational methods in elementary schools between California and west Texas; which could affect his own kids. After receiving training on inquiry-based teaching methods and constructivism from the American Physical Society in Maryland in 1997, Jorge began to participate actively in educational programs both at UTEP and in several school districts in El Paso. From 2002 to 2004 Jorge reformed the physical education courses UTEP imparts to education majors, increasing the number of courses and the number of students impacted. Jorge also began to develop and teach methodology for pre-K and K (2003-2007), held workshops for high school physics teachers (2004), and introduced peer leaders in many of UTEP’s STEM courses (2009-2012). More recently (2019-2020) Jorge has been reforming the Astronomy course under the TeachTech program, and he is currently working on developing a credentialization program on data science in physics (2022).
Jorge’s efforts have been noticed by many professional organizations. He became Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 2007, received the Hyer Award for Research With an Undergraduate from the Texas Section of APS in 2009, the 2010 Maestro Bravo Award from MAES, the Educator of the Year from SHPE in 2011, was inducted to the Mexican Academy of Sciences in 2012, received the Mentoring Award from the Division of Nuclear Physics of APS in 2014, the 2015 Edward A. Bouchet Award of APS (which recognizes distinguished minority physicists), the University of Texas Regent’s Outstanding Teaching Award in 2016, was inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Former Students of Texas A&M University in 2018, received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring awarded by the White House and the National Science Foundation in 2018, the Lifetime Achievement Award for Mentoring from the prestigious journal Nature in 2018, received a “Recognition of Excellence” from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board in 2019, and a few more.
To close this biography with a commercial, in 2018 Jorge wrote the book “Ciencia en El Paso del Norte”, in Spanish, which contains a collection of short stories about scientific or pseudoscientific endeavors that have taken place in the extended Paso del Norte region. In a way, Ciencia exemplifies the problem of introducing Hispanics to STEM fields, part of the problem is the culture, and part of it is the lack of knowhow, Jorge’s long list of achievements can certainly help with the latter part. The book can be purchased at a ridiculous low price in Amazon.
