For today’s scientist highlight we will be talking about Dr. Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz. Dr. Ramirez-Ruiz’s main area of research is in the dynamics of plasma in extreme astrophysical environments. He also works as the director of the Lamat program.

The program promotes the retention of women and underrepresented minorities in STEM fields.

Dr. Ramirez-Ruiz was born in Mexico to a biochemist and chemical engineer. As a child, he was highly interested in gravity and the simple math of Newton’s Laws that can describe nature.

Dr. Ramirez-Ruiz decided to stick to the STEM that ran in the family and studied physics at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. He furthered his educational career by pursuing his PhD at Cambridge University.

Currently Dr. Ramirez-Ruiz is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz and has very recently been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the oldest and most prestigious honorary societies in the nation!

Dr. Ramirez-Ruiz is one of the leading authorities on complex computer simulations used the explore collisions and mergers of compact objects like black holes and neutron stars. His theoretical predictions help create a framework for understanding observational data, like LIGO.

This work is really striving to understand basic physical questions in extreme high energy astrophysical environments.

Helping people from underrepresented groups in STEM is also a passion of Dr. Ramirez-Ruiz.

He created and runs the Lamat program, which helps give undergraduate students from minorities the ability to work on some of the world’s most advanced computers by pairing them with UCSC faculty and graduate students.

Dr. Ramirez-Ruiz attributes his drive to help others in STEM to the fact that a university education in Mexico is completely free. This has made him very aware of his need to give back to a society which invested so much into him.

Dr. Ramirez-Ruiz has been highly awarded for not only his research, but also his work in diversifying the field of astrophysics. He has received awards from the American Physical Society, the American Astronomical Society, & the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced study at Harvard.

At 35 he became the youngest person to be inducted into the Mexican Academy of Sciences, just to name a few of Dr. Ramirez-Ruiz’s accomplishments. He has also been a holder of the Vera Rubin Presidential Chair for Diversity in Astronomy.

If you are interested in some of the astonishing and groundbreaking research Dr. Ramirez-Ruiz is doing and how we are actually made from stardust, make sure to watch his TED Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/enrico_ramirez_ruiz_your_body_was_forged_in_the_spectacular_death_of_stars

If you are interested in his Lamat program, check out their website at http://stemdiv.ucsc.edu/lamat/