This post is the first in a two-part series highlighting Professor Jorge Moreno’s astronomy story inside and outside the classroom. To read more about his work towards creating a framework for an inclusive classroom, see the second part here.
Professor Jorge Moreno — or Profe Moreno, as his students endearingly call him — is an associate professor of astronomy at Pomona College in Southern California. He is also the fourth Mexican astronomer to earn tenure at an American university. Through a long and winding road mired with adversity, Profe Moreno’s story is one of perseverance and an undying conviction to pursue his passions for math and physics.
Profe Moreno’s journey began in Nezahualcoyotl, a working-class suburb of Mexico City, where he spent the first part of his childhood into middle school, before his family moved to Los Angeles. It was around this time that his interest in math was born, when he came across an algebra textbook by Cuban mathematician Aurelio Baldor that belonged to his dad. For starters, the cover — which featured Al-Khwarizmi, a Persian mathematician — caught his attention and he recalls thinking “wait, this guy kind of looks like me.” This, combined with the excitement he felt while solving the puzzles posed by the book, seeded an interest in pursuing a career in math. However, doing so wasn’t so straightforward for him. Despite his interests and background in the subject (having self-studied at home), a high school administrator enrolled him in the most basic math course offered, explaining that more advanced math would be unnecessary for him, “Don’t worry, your people only get jobs at Burger King.” Invigorated by this, Profe Moreno took math courses every summer until he exhausted all the classes at Venice High School and started sitting in on advanced classes at the local community colleges and UCLA. During these classes, however, he realized that proof-based math classes were not his cup of tea, and he decided to pursue mathematical physics when applying to college.
Though he was clearly a passionate and qualified candidate, Profe Moreno found himself without any offers from American universities and had to move back to Mexico City with his family. After doing so, he was admitted to Cinvestav, a polytechnic school, where he carried out research in string theory under the supervision of Prof. Hugo García Compean. Physics classes in Mexico were different from advanced classes at his high school in the US, as he was now surrounded by people who looked like him. Because public universities are free in Mexico, the socioeconomic demographics of students were noticeably different as well. He recounts one example, “my office mate, he was from Sinaloa, a state in the Pacific. And he was so poor that he couldn’t afford the bus ticket to come to Mexico City. So he would jump on freight trains for several days to get to Mexico City.” In fact, the majority of his classmates opted to live in their offices because they couldn’t afford rent.
During these years, he became involved with activism as well. In 1999, the Mexican government famously attempted to revise their free tuition policy and charge for students to attend the nearby National Autonomous University (UNAM). Profe Moreno, along with his peers from Cinvestav, joined the movement and occasionally taught informal classes to support a 200,000- strong student strike that lasted nearly 11 months at UNAM.
Around this time, he and others also volunteered bringing books, canned food, and medicine to Oventic, a Totzil community that had resisted colonialism for centuries in Chiapas, a Mexican state bordering Guatemala — during an uprising. He reflects on that experience as a wake up call from his naïvete: “[I was] a 20 year old college student, I came there to save them and to help them and to teach them. And it was like a bucket of cold water. It was like, no, I’m the one who needs to be humble and learn from them because they’re the ones who know what they’re doing.” Indeed, some of the traditions and behaviors that he learned during that time now inspire facets of his inclusive classroom model.
Profe Moreno admits to feeling desperate about the political situation in his country and the world. Faced between two options, activism or a career in physics, he chose the latter. But this meant returning to his original dream of returning to the US for graduate school after being denied that opportunity for college. However, again he found himself without any offers. Unperturbed, he doubled down and completed an extra year of research in string theory at Cinvestav, published a paper, and reapplied the following year, ultimately choosing to attend the University of Pennsylvania for a PhD in physics. Though he initially planned on continuing with string theory, an early advisor there, Prof. Burt Ovrut, encouraged him to broaden his job prospects by looking at other fields, so he began to study cosmology and large scale structure with his advisor, Prof. Ravi Sheth.
Graduate school was not an easy time financially for Profe Moreno and his family as he had to raise two children on a graduate student salary. This problem really reached a head in the final year of his degree when his advisor ran out of funding and he had to take up a teaching position at the nearby Haverford College to cover his stipend. Juggling these responsibilities — raising two young children, finishing his thesis, and starting a new teaching position — while simultaneously facing racism from students in that position and little support from his department or institution, made the experience especially challenging. Nevertheless, once again, Profe Moreno persevered and completed his PhD.
Applying to postdoctoral positions, Profe Moreno once again found himself without any offers and had to carry on as a visiting teaching faculty at Haverford for another year before finally accepting a position at SISSA in Trieste, Italy. Upon arriving there, he discovered that the astrophysics group at SISSA was largely skeptical of the hierarchical picture of structure formation (where small objects form first and merge to form larger ones), so he was fairly isolated in his work. Faced with this, he recounts, “I grabbed some data from the publicly available Millennium Simulation and I said, you know what, I’m just going to do science by myself. And I wrote a single author paper.” He credits the solo-project experience with helping him discover his identity as an astronomer and helping him grow to become an independent scientist, and encourages early career researchers who might have an idea to do the same.
In this capacity as a postdoc, he also won a small grant from the European Union and was able to organize a conference to bring other researchers to his university in Italy. Though conference organizing was totally new to him and fairly time consuming, he found that it was an excellent way to network and collaborate with people all over the world in his subfield. Indeed, it was at this conference that he met his second postdoc advisors, Prof. Sara Ellison and Prof. David Patton, who later sponsored him for a CITA National Fellowship at the University of Victoria in Canada. Citing this experience, Profe Moreno emphasizes the importance of being proactive to succeed in academia. Now, he encourages students to advocate for themselves, by inviting themselves to attend conferences and give talks, no matter how out-of-character that can feel.
After his second postdoc, he began applying for faculty positions and ultimately accepted an offer to be a professor at Cal Poly Pomona. Though Cal Poly Pomona is a Hispanic-serving institution, he was shocked to see that “some of [his] colleagues treated Latine students and other students of color in really abusive ways,” but also began to recognize that, as faculty, “there was something [he] could do about that to change that.” This spurred him on to begin critically thinking about his pedagogy and it is from this moment that he began to craft the blueprint for an inclusive classroom. With the support of a National Science Foundation grant, and Harvard’s Institute for Theory and Computation, he directed the Harvard-Aztlán Institute between 2015 and 2018. Around the same time he also chaired the AAS Committee on the Status of Minorities.
Trump’s presidency and the turbulent political times that followed took a toll on Profe Moreno’s health. After burning out, therapy, medication, and support from friends and family helped him reframe his approach. This led to a realization that “people are resourceful. And people are not alone. So rather than me trying to save them, I can give them advice. I can connect them to the right people and set them off on the right path and just trust that the universe will take care of them.” This has also allowed him to spend more time doing the things he likes – such as reading and running – with his beloved family. “I just wish I had taken this step sooner!”
All this brought him to where he is today, an associate professor at Pomona College who, as of 2023, was just awarded tenure. When he joined Pomona, though he was a tenure track faculty member, he felt that he still had room to grow as a scientist and needed some mentoring, so he started to build a network of people who he had grown to admire over the years. Reflecting on this, he emphasizes the importance for young scientists to build a community of mentors, which he jokingly referred to as a Frankenstein network. “You bring together people and different people serve different purposes. Some of them can be very senior, some of them could be your peers.” From these relationships, he’s seen himself rapidly mature into the scientist, teacher, and mentor that he is today.
Throughout this journey, Profe Moreno has faced countless challenges, naysayers, and personal struggles but through sheer tenacity has persevered time and again. As we concluded our conversation he entreated me to “find joy every day. Don’t wait until you have tenure to be happy. You can be happy now – and make it a habit to find laughter every day of your life!” And indeed, it was abundantly clear that he embodies this credo in his own life and is doggedly working to ensure that others after him are able to as well.
To learn more about Profe Moreno’s work or contact him, check out his website! For more about his teaching and mentoring philosophy, see part 2 of this series here.
Edited by Pranav Satheesh
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