2023-06-01 06:01:01
At the age of three, he read fluently. This is how the priest of his town told it. Today, that precocious child is a professor of Electromagnetism at the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) and has become the first physicist to receive the Prize from the Confederation of Scientific Societies of Spain (COSCE), which brings together 87 entities, to the dissemination of science in its 16-year history. The candidacy of Jorge Mira (Baio, 1968) was supported by the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence (AEPIA) and the Royal Spanish Physics Society (RSEF). The award jury highlights his ability to reach wide audiences by disseminating different scientific disciplines and his work as director of the USC ConCiencia program, in which more than 40 Nobel Prize winners and their equivalent in mathematics and computer science have participated.
Looking back, Mira is surprised that 25 years have passed since she started talking about science on TV. “They signed me after I went through “¡Que serán?” (TVE), where I was invited to explain the calculation of the temperatures of heaven and hell that I made together with a college classmate and from there I didn’t stop. In the end, what people know me for is my television image, ”she comments.
Since the end of the 1990s, Mira has carried out an outstanding dissemination of science in a wide variety of formats: press (several hundred articles and columns), radio (more than 1,000 broadcasts from its popularization sections), television (in the order of 2,500 sections or entire programmes) and organization of major science communication actions. He assures that the world of scientific dissemination has changed a lot in this quarter of a century. “When I started there was very little scientific dissemination and what was done was very punctual. Today there are a lot of initiatives and social networks have caused an explosion. The institutions themselves are also more concerned with reporting on what their research groups do, ”she explains.
In his opinion, Spain is a country with great scientists and the future of science is very promising because young scientists have a “very high level”, which guarantees success. “I am sure that there will always be people who do science because scientific talent always ends up coming out, even when times are difficult. There have been before and science has been done. There are things to improve, of course, but I think we will move forward ”, he affirms.
As for ConCiencia, a unique initiative in Spain, he acknowledged that when it started 17 years ago, he never thought it could achieve the impact it has. In the program, in addition to public events, bridges are built between the invited personalities and the body of researchers from related areas of knowledge, and high-impact dissemination actions are carried out in the media in society.
Renowned scientists such as Professor Francisco José Ayala, paleoanthropologist Juan Luis Arsuaga and microbiologist Ignacio López Goñi have received the COSCE award in previous editions. Mira adds this to others with whom he has been recognized throughout his career. The most recent is the Galician Research Medal in 2022.
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