The board of the Chilean Physics Society (SOCHIFI), in consultation with the Scientific Committee of the XXIII Chilean Physics Symposium, decided to award the Chilean Physics Society Medal to CEDENNA researcher Dr. Patricio Vargas for “his outstanding contributions both to the field of Physics and to the progress of SOCHIFI”. The award was presented at a ceremony held during the XXIII Chilean Physics Symposium.
Dr. Vargas is a researcher in CEDENNA’s Magnetic Nanostructures Line. He holds a degree in Physics and a Master’s in Physics from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and a PhD in Physics from the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart, Germany. Between 1978 and 1999 he was a professor at Universidad de Santiago de Chile. Since 2000 he has been a Full Professor at Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María in the Valparaíso Region.
He has worked on the electronic structure of materials and, in particular, has taken part in developing a method for studying disordered systems known as LMTO (Linear Muffin Tin Orbitals). His work in image processing has enabled him to contribute to applied research in Medical Physics, a field in which he has several published works.
In this regard, he also holds a granted patent for a method to correct medical images in a SPECT (Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography) study of a patient’s organ for subsequent tomographic reconstruction. For 7 years he was Principal Investigator of the Millennium Nucleus in Condensed Matter Physics, focusing on magnetic nanostructures and on developing a prototype for brain examinations in nuclear medicine. He is the author of 150 WoS publications and has trained 10 PhDs in the field.
