page_title: Science and technology in Venezuela
section_title: Astrophysics
hierarchical_section_title: Science and technology in Venezuela / Physics / Astrophysics
caption_attribution_description: English: Julian Chela-Flores and the gulf of Trieste
context_page_description: Science and technology in Venezuela includes research based on exploring Venezuela's diverse ecology and the lives of its indigenous peoples.
  Under the Spanish rule, the monarchy made very little effort to promote education in the American colonies and in particular in those in which they had less commercial interest, as in Venezuela. The country only had its first university some two hundred years later than Mexico, Colombia or Peru.
  The first studies on the native languages of Venezuela and the indigenous customs were made in the middle of the XVIII century by the Catholic missionaries. The Jesuits Joseph Gumilla and Filippo Salvatore Gilii were the first to theorize about linguistic relations and propose possible language families for the Orinoco river basin. The Swedish botanist Pehr Löfling, one of the 12 Apostles of Carl Linnaeus, classificated for the first time the exhuberant tropical flora of the Orinoco river basin.
context_section_description: Julian Chela-Flores (born June 13, 1942 in Caracas). Astrobiologist and physicist known for his contributions to the field of planetary habitability. He lived in England where he studied in the University of London, obtaining a PhD in Quantum Mechanics in 1969. From 1971 till 1990 he worked in academic matters continually, especially in research at the Centre of Physics, the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research (Full Researcher 1978) and at the Physics Department, Simon Bolivar University (Full Professor 1980), both in Caracas. He is Full Professor ad honorem at the Institute for Advanced Studies (IDEA, Caracas) having been a co-founder of IDEA in 1980. Since 1994 he is an Associate Member of the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies and International Centre for Theoretical Physics(ITCP) in Trieste. His field of research is astrobiology, in other words the science of the origin, evolution, distribution and destiny of life in the universe, especially life on Europa, the Jovian satellite.
  Humberto Campins (born in Barquisimeto, 1946) is an international expert on asteroids and comets. He attended the University of Kansas where he earned a bachelor's degree in astronomy. He went onto the University of Arizona where he earned a PhD in planetary sciences. As a graduate student he was named a representative to the Committee for Peaceful Uses of Outer Space of the General Assembly of the United Nations.  He conducts research at observatories around the world, including Arizona, Chile, France, Hawaii, Spain and the Vatican. In 2010 he discovered water ice and organic molecules on the asteroid 24 Themis and later on 65 Cybele adding weight to the growing theory that Earth's water may have come from asteroids. His expertise have landed him on NASA and European Space Agency teams preparing interplanetary vehicles that will launch in the coming few years, including the OSIRIS-REx project and the Marco Polo-R mission. Since 2002 worked at the University of Central Florida and University of Arizona. He has earned several prestigious awards including a Fulbright and the Don Quijote Award. The asteroid, 3327 Campins, was named after him.
  Gustavo Bruzual (born in Caracas, August 2, 1949). Astronomer and PhD degree in 1981 from the University of California in Berkeley, USA. His thesis versed on Spectral Evolution of Galaxies. Then after he joined the staff at Centro de Investigaciones de Astronomía (CIDA) in Mérida, Venezuela, where he served for more than 30 years, including 21 years as director of the center. His research is centered on evolutionary population synthesis and modeling the spectral evolution of galaxies. His work in collaboration with S. Charlot (IAP, France) has become a landmark in the field. Their three papers together have received over 6200 citations. The Bruzual and Charlot (2003) models have proven very useful in deriving the physical properties of galaxies of different types observed in large galaxy surveys like the SDSS, allowing to characterize galaxies at various redshifts as belonging to the red sequence or the blue cloud, and providing an estimate of the stellar mass and its growth rate, in these systems. Currently G. Bruzual is working on improving different aspects of stellar population synthesis, like the treatment of TP-AGB and WR stars in spectral evolution models. Actually is investigador Titular at the Centro de Radioastronomía y Astrofísica (CryA) in the Morelia Campus of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and professor at the UNAM Graduate Program in Astrophysics.
caption: Julian Chela-Flores at ICTP of Trieste (Italy)
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