Ignacia Calisto becomes the first director of the Department of Geophysics

Ignacia Calisto Burgos She has been a professor in the Department of Geophysics since 2012 and has just been elected director of that unit. It was not a common election process, since, by agreement of all the professors of said department, the position of director is granted according to the year of hiring, with which all the professors will have to exercise it. It does have a peculiarity and it is that it is the first time that a woman becomes a director, a responsibility in which Ignacia will be for two years.

This, she explains, has more to do with the historically low number of women in her discipline. Today are two teachers out of a total of 13 members of the department and although he sees more students in the postgraduate course, he feels that there is still a long way to go.

Ignacia studied Physics at UdeC and did his doctorate in Physics, but inclined to the area of ​​Seismology, at this same university. “While in my doctorate I became interested in the area of ​​Earth Sciences, I was in Germany and after the postdoctorate I went to Japan. While there I started working in the department”.

In addition to her academic career, Ignacia is the mother of three children. Adding and subtracting, she spent several years dedicated to them between pre and postnatal. “You set aside several years, depending on the number of children you want to have. I was never outside that much, but when I fully resumed my career, I was able to insert myself again. For the women who work in academia it is important to know that this can be reconciled, have children and be able to assume positions of responsibility”.

For Ignacia, her husband’s support is essential in this task, since they share responsibilities and take on less or greater care tasks, when the other has a heavier academic task. Second, she believes that the Department’s work formula, with much more horizontal decisions and agreed, is a good working strategy.

“With my husband we are clear that we both have children and that we have to take care of ourselves. When it was his turn to be director of the department, I was the one who supported him and now it’s the other way around”.

In addition to her work as an academic and now administrative, Ignacia participates in instances such as the Researchers Network, a space that brings together women from different areas of knowledge. “In general, in masculinized careers there are very few women in positions and the higher you are, the fewer women. That goes beyond your capabilities, there has to be a bigger pool where you can get more women.

We have to start from the bottom, more equity in the academic plant, more women in the doctorate. Here it happens that these processes generally take place just at the time when you have to decide things like whether you want to have children, and the system should take that into account and understand that it does not mean that we are going to perform less or be worse civil servants, we are trained to do it all”.