Today we’d like to introduce you to Sergio Carbajo.
Hi Sergio, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I am a Basque-Spanish-American scientist, educator, musician and composer, and creative writer residing in Los Angeles and Donostia-San Sebastian, Basque Country in Spain. I grew up in Hernani, a working-class town neighboring Donostia, where my loving parents and community were able to provide me with early exposure to arts and science. During my upbringing, I was classically trained in music and composition while I attended school. After I finished my master’s in engineering, I left (only partly) my home to continue on my doctoral studies in the US and in Germany, and have continued to advance in my scientific career to settle now as a faculty at UCLA and Stanford.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It’s certainly been a very nonlinear process – I’m sure that’s the case for most. It’s been filled with many jagged lines from severe health issues to major obstacles based on class and identity. Against the odds, I’ve also had extreme luck and great privilege to propel forward. I recognize that I’ve already outrun my own professional expectations. This continues to permeate into the way I understand and perform my work as an academic and artist. So all in all, I cannot say I’d be the same person I am today without the challenge.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
At the most fundamental interpretation, I’m a molecular filmmaker. My strategy is inspired by Muybridge’s curiosity and technically artful approach: we record stop-action movies of quantum, atomic, molecules in action. Our films rely on two basic efforts. First, we build unique electron and photon sources across a wide range of characteristics sculpted to meet the demands of processes we’d like to study, from medical and radiation therapies to quantum electrodynamics – you may think of us as photon and electron architects. And second, we build sophisticated cameras to record in real-time how these processes evolve from the smallest (quantum) level to the macroscale, which requires an incredible level of time and space resolution. This is because early, developmental dynamics at the quantum level wind up determining the functional properties of materials and physical processes.
I am an assistant professor at the University of California Los Angeles Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) and the UCLA Physics & Astronomy departments and visiting professor at Stanford University’s Photon Science Division at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. I am also the founder and director of the Quantum Light-Matter Cooperative, a scientific consortium whose mission is to understand, design, and ultimately control light-driven physical processes to help solve interconnected socio-technological challenges. For example, we want to find out exactly how photosynthetic systems harness light from the sun and transform it into reusable energy. We are also interested in activating drugs or biological processes with light or reducing anthropogenic waste, such as examining decarbonization strategies that split carbon dioxide into added-value products.
As a musician and composer, I like to explore creative processes at the intersection between arts and sciences through experimental pieces and recordings, and acoustic and electronic instruments. My primary instruments are the woodwinds and especially the clarinet.
Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?
I couldn’t live without the work of Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Imani Perry, and many others.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://light-matter.seas.ucla.edu/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergio-carbajo-ucla-stanford/
- Twitter: @lightmattercoop
- Youtube: @juliantelleriavevo7045
- SoundCloud: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1slrkLQSDAqTEE3vfhtQNN?si=GH-zwXLmTcuyPSOkmsOJeQ
