page_title: Ivan Vargas-Blanco
section_title: Early Years and education
hierarchical_section_title: Ivan Vargas-Blanco / Early Years and education
caption_attribution_description: Español: Bosquejo de un reactor de fusión de Iván Vargas Blanco
context_page_description: Ivan Vargas-Blanco is Costa Rican plasma and nuclear fusion physicist. He is renowned for his work in plasma physics and nuclear fusion. Currently, as a professor and tenured researcher at the Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica, he heads the Plasma Laboratory for Fusion Energy and Applications that he founded in 2011.
  On August 11, 2016, Legislative Assembly of the Republic of Costa Rica recognized the contributions and leadership of Vargas-Blanco in the design, construction, and implementation of the first high temperature plasma magnetic confinement Stellarator type device to be built in Latin America. This fact made Costa Rica one of only eight countries in the world to possess this type of technology for nuclear fusion research. He is a promoter of plasma physics applications for medical, agricultural, and industrial uses in his countries.
  On November 30, 2016, the government of Costa Rica honored Vargas-Blanco with the Clodomiro Picado Twight National Prize for Science and Technology. A few days later, on December 4, the Costa Rican newspaper La Nación chose Vargas-Blanco as one "News Character of The Year" in their Sunday Magazine edition.
context_section_description: Vargas-Blanco is the second of five children born in the Canton Central de Alajuela to Susana Blanco Solis and Victor Manuel Vargas Rodriguez. The family were raised in "Concepcion de la Palmera" San Carlos de Alajuela, a rural north region of Costa Rica. His mother, Susana, is a housewife who worked daily in a family restaurant until 2018. His father, Victor, was a dairy farmer who later in life joined wife Susana managing the restaurant. Vargas-Blanco's schooling began at a small primary unified public school in Conception de la Palmera (1980–85), and he remembers, "There was a year when we were only ten students in the whole school". His interest in the sciences began early in life when many after school hours were dedicated to studying the only three science books available at the primary school.
  
  One book titled, "Lo Que Queremos Saber de la Técnica", (What We Want To Know About Technique), fostered a deep desire to learn more about rockets and nuclear fusion. Even as a child, Vargas-Blanco would compose notes on ideas about particle physics and nuclear fusion.
  I would filled a notebook with my questions and leave a space to later come back and try to answer them. I would ask myself: what happens when a proton collides with a neutron or another proton? I came up with sketches of a nuclear fusion propulsion rocket that I was going to build and send into space, or so I believed. — Ivan Vargas-Blanco
  
  From childhood to adolescence, Vargas-Blanco would spend his free time doing homemade experiments in his father's dairy.
  I got to the point where I had a completely homemade lab because I could not afford to buy one. It consisted of veterinary jars that my father had at the dairy; I made myself a microscope with a surveyor lens and a centrifuge with a toy engine. My chemistry laboratory was made out of tools and products that my father had at the dairy. I would do experiments every day, up the point when one day I almost burned my Dad's dairy. — Ivan Vargas-Blanco
  Vargas-Blanco completed his secondary school studies at the Colegio Técnico Profesional Agropecuario de Aguas Zarcas in San Carlos, Alajuela. He had three kilometers daily walks followed by a one-hour truck ride to reach the school. There, he founded a scientific club and participated in The National Fairs of Science and Technology, earning several awards of merit including first place at a national level in 1989. His project received a perfect score.
  The University of Costa Rica accepted Ivan Vargas-Blanco to its undergraduate program majoring in physics in 1991. One year later, concerned about the practicality of pursuing a career in physics, he switched his major to Electrical Engineering. However, the young undergraduate's doubts were short lived. By year three he returned to a major in physics, even though the family could no longer support the studies because of economic limitations.
  
  Undaunted, he studied mathematics then taught in high school academies to finance aspirations for a career in physics. The studies at the University of Costa Rica led to an undergraduate degree in the year 2000.
  His father, Don Victor, recalls asking "Ivan, why do you study something so difficult? I don't see a job market for it". His son's stoic reply, "Dad, you have to die doing what you like". — Andrea Solano, journalist, La Nación newspaper
  By 2001, grad student Ivan Vargas-Blanco was hired as a Professor at the Tecnológico de Costa Rica, then in 2002 was awarded a two-year doctoral scholarship from the Instituto de Acustica del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas and the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain. During his second year in Spain, Vargas-Blanco was accepted into the PhD program in Plasma and Nuclear Fusion at Complutense University of Madrid, entering into the Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas (CIEMAT), where the Laboratorio Nacional de Fusion is located. It was here that Vargas-Blanco developed his doctoral thesis project on local plasma transport in magnetic confinement devices. Once the two-year scholarsh
caption: Draft of a nuclear fusion rocket by child Ivan Vargas-Blanco.
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