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 Technology News | April 2005 
Mexican Immigrant Making Strides in High-Tech Math
 Joe Rodriguez - Knight Ridder Newspapers
| | Prize-winning senior scientist, Cipriano "Pano" Santos. |
San Jose, Calif. - Four decades ago, Cipriano "Pano" Santos would put aside his crutches and sit in front of his family's television set in Mexico City, entranced by the sight of American astronauts blasting off. A Mexican boy wasn't supposed to look north for heroes, and boys with polio weren't supposed to dream at all.
But Santos dreamed anyway.
"I wanted to be an astronaut," he said recently, sitting in his cubicle at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, Calif. "But, as you can see, that goal was not going to be too realistic."
The prize-winning senior scientist with a wavy, jet-black James Dean haircut lifted himself up from his chair and smiled.
"I need some coffee."
He walked to a kitchen not far from Bill Hewlett and David Packard's old offices - inspirational living museums that remain as the technology pioneers left them, simple and direct. Santos usually carries a cup of coffee back in a plastic baggy pinched between his fingers.
"A very high-tech method," he cracked.
In the rarefied atmosphere of high-technology science and mathematics, Santos shines like a lone star.
"In the world he's in, he's a very rare individual, and I'm not talking about just Hispanic scientists," said Ray Mellado, chairman of the Hispanic Engineers National Achievement Awards Corporation. "He's a world-class scientist."
The organization recently gave Santos one of two top awards for technological achievement in 2004.
Santos specializes in mathematical optimization. To explain, he took a piece of paper and drew a simple graph showing a product's upward sales, then its fall.
What companies need to know, he said, is what they should do during the decline. Continue production, advertise like crazy and lower prices? Or sell what's in the warehouse and jump to the next product generation?
These "optimization engines" help engineers and managers plan months in advance for changes in demand, sales, competition and their own inventory, production capacity, marketing and pricing.
When he's not optimizing, Santos does plenty more. The signs of an eclectic and idealistic mind are all over his cluttered cubicle. He's got not only the expected books on algorithms but also eye-catching tomes on cosmology, philosophy of religion, Mexican art and the politics of immigration.
A large, early childhood photo of him and his father sits next to his computer screen. There's one of his mother and snapshots of his two sons.
Stricken by polio at age 3, Santos said his parents treated him as if he were any active child. They took him everywhere, on walks throughout the city and hikes in the hills, carrying him only when it was necessary.
At age 7, spinal surgery forced him into bed for three months. A math tutor hired by his parents discovered he had a gift for math and gave him advanced material.
"By the time I got back to school," Santos said, "I was ahead of everyone else."
He gradually fell in love with numbers, graduating in 1980 from Mexico's National Autonomous University with a degree in applied mathematics.
He went to work on a project to allocate oil profits to agricultural development. That work won him the President's Excellence Award but, ironically, the experience persuaded him to leave the country.
"The politics in Mexico made it very difficult for science to help the situation of the people and country."
He wasn't the first Mexican techno-refugee. The World Bank two years ago warned Mexico to energize innovation and entrepreneurship or watch jobs and brains drain away.
Mexico's technological output, Santos said, has been abysmal for decades. It has been hamstrung by institutional complacency, an old-boy scientific network and by scant research funding and entrepreneurial incentives.
In patent awards and spending on research and development, the nation lags behind its main competitors, Chile, Brazil, India and China.
In 1982, Santos moved to the University of Waterloo in Canada, where he earned a doctorate with a paper on mathematical optimization applied to production scheduling.
That's about the time HP's Shilendra Jain was recruiting for an elite team of applied mathematicians. Jain had heard about Santos from a Waterloo professor speaking in New York City. Santos joined HP Labs in 1990.
If Santos did nothing more than optimize production, he would cement his legacy at HP and among Latino techies. But he can't forget the beloved country he left behind.
One of his more recent side projects was a software program that makes it easier and less expensive for Mexicans in the United States to wire money home.
A much wider goal is to help Mexico develop a "national vision for its economy" through research and development in certain fields.
"Look at Mexico's rich diversity of trees and plants," he said. "It's huge! The country should be a leader in bio-pharmaceutical research."
Santos has several ideas for improving Mexican R&D, but his most passionate is for bringing bright, young Mexican scientists to the United States to work and learn at companies like HP. Then they'll return to energize Mexico technological ascendancy.
He asked his first test case, Norman Salazar, to step in from the next cubicle. The 22-year-old computer science graduate from the University of Hermosillo already has filed for two U.S. patents after only eight months at HP.
"I don't see real research opportunities in Mexico outside of a few universities," Salazar said. "For someone like me, the opportunity to apply research to real work happens in companies like this one."
Mellado of the Hispanic Engineers Award group said others share Santos' binational vision, but Santos is one of the few who can persuade institutions and companies on both sides of the border to participate.
"You have to be a member of that club," Mellado said. "They're engineers and scientists, but I still call them a club. They'll listen to you only if you've been successful in the field. Santos has that kind of clout."
For now, Santos' top priority is to train young Mexican scientists to lead a technology revolution in Mexico.
"Of all my projects," he said, "that is my real passion." |
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