Paris, 9 November— Physicist Ana María Cetto is so passionate about light that, when it was decided in 2010 to close down the Museo de la Luz at San Pedro y San Pablo College, she worked tirelessly to transfer the museum to the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She also played a major role in promoting the International Year of Light in 2015 and in the establishment of the annual International Day of Light. On 13 November, she was awarded the UNESCO–Kalinga Prize for Popularization of Science at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, in recognition of her efforts to make scientific knowledge more accessible to the masses.
Professor Cetto is the author of a book targeting the public entitled Light: in Nature and in the Laboratory (La Luz: en la Naturaleza y en el Laboratorio) which retraces the history of the study of light and optical theories through the ages. It has sold about 100 000 copies. She is currently leading a multidisciplinary team that is seeking to improve urban lighting, under the Lights over the City project. The team is working on a proposal for the city authorities and the Federal Ministry of the Environment to adopt standards and norms which would place them in compliance with the recently enacted law to combat light pollution.
Determined to ensure that science reaches the greatest number, she led the translation of outreach materials on different scientific topics into ten of her country’s Indigenous languages, in her previous role as President of the Mexican Physical Society. Even now that her term of office has ended, the translations into other indigenous languages continue.
A Research Professor at UNAM’s Institute of Physics, Ana María Cetto holds a PhD in physics from UNAM and a Master of Biophysics degree from Harvard University in the USA.
She founded Latindex in the 1990s to promote open access to scientific knowledge. Today, she is President of the UNESCO Open Science Steering Committee and occupies the UNESCO Chair on Science Diplomacy and Heritage.
Ana María Cetto received her prize from the Assistant Director-General for Natural Sciences at UNESCO, Lidia Arthur Brito, at an event commemorating World Science Day for Peace and Development (10 November). The ceremony was preceded by a High-Level Round Table on the theme of Building Trust in Science at the Nexus of Science, Policy and Society.
With the current epidemic of misinformation and disinformation undermining trust in science, it has never been more important to celebrate talented science popularizers capable of communicating scientific concepts in a language that everyone can understand. The UNESCO– Kalinga Prize for Popularization of Science has never been more relevant.
The prize was created by UNESCO in 1951, thanks to a donation by Patnaik Bijoyanand, Founding President of the Kalinga Foundation Trust of India. Awarded every two years, the Prize is now also sponsored by the Government of India through the Department of Science and Technology, as well as by the Odisha State Government. The laureate is selected by an international jury and receives $40,000 in prize money, plus a diploma and the UNESCO Albert Einstein Medal.
