It has been nearly 10 years since Nacho landed at CERN and although, as he says, there are no Ikea instructions, he knew how to assemble all the furnitures at the first try. What started with a student scholarship has metamorphosed, with enthusiasm and determination, into an exemplary career.
This industrial engineer’s roots are based on Madrid, on the central Chamberí. If there is a thing that he misses from his neighborhood, it is having some cañas with his friends at the usual bar. But the friendships of that time also flew to other planets, with their own baobaps, roses and lambs.
Although he fondly remembers the Madrid that he left behind, where there was no room for the adult worries, Nacho is very happy in Ferney-Voltaire, where he lives with his wife and his little daughter, who still enjoys that freedom of thought that belongs the childhood. The one that resembles the freedom of the sea. Although knowing will set us free, sometimes Nacho envies the innocence of those little people who, when looking up and seeing the moon, also observe brilliant mysteries and questions.
When he entered CERN as a “chavalín”, he had the pleasure of chatting, accompanied by a cup of coffee, with one of his references, Sergio Calatroni, an Italian physicist specialized in surface coatings and technologies who, like Nacho until now, has developed all his professional career at CERN. Right now, our engineer dreams of having those coffees conversely. He would like to be a reference, to make a name for himself at CERN. To be the figure of that Walter White who, before reaching methamphetamine, was an academic eminence.
In his everyday life, Nacho collides with beauty in atypical gadgets, such as a solder or a microstructure. Also, when it is time for a chemical attack. He thinks that beauty lives in carrying complexity forward, in a group of engineers from different fields who find together the solution to a problem. Artists who fix the universe’s “rotos y descosidos”. Seeing that creation and its functionality seems very beautiful to him.
Nacho, curious by nature, friend of the asteroid B-612 and already a reference in the area for his “cocido madrileño”, will not go unnoticed at CERN, nor at this planet. And it is that “el que nace pa’ gordo, tontá es que lo enfajen”.