María Josefa Yzuel (Jaca, Huesca, 82 years old), Marifí to her friends and acquaintances, is much more than a scientist, it is an institution for physicists, and especially for physicists, from Spain and a good part of the rest of the world. world.
Six decades of constant work in the laboratory and her very active participation in most of the international societies of her discipline have made her an icon.
This small, agile, alert woman, with a prodigious memory, a bombproof humor and a very quick smile, has developed important work in the area of optics, the branch of physics that deals with the study of behavior and properties. of the light.
Almost a perfect stranger outside of her native Aragon, which in recent years has been in charge of vindicating her figure, Yzuel is, however, one of the most recognized physicists in the world.
A sign of its importance is given, for example, by the fact that the International Society of Optics and Photonics, the most important scientific society in this discipline in the world, awards the María Josefa Yzuel Educator Award since 2003 to those people who stand out in teaching. of optics.
Josefa Yzuel seems tireless.
Her retirement is not for her;
emeritus professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, continues to go to the laboratory two or three days a week: “Although I no longer publish, I continue to participate in group meetings and in projects, but in recent years I am devoting myself more to education and the dissemination of science.
Especially since in 2013 I was appointed president of the Spanish Committee for the International Year of Light”.
Yzuel's scientific career is a perfect reflection of how the Spanish scientific system has evolved from those rare researchers (and to a much lesser extent, still female researchers) who in the 1960s began to do postdoctoral stays in other countries or who launched, as she herself did, to publish in international journals, until today, in which this is the norm.
It's 60 years of science in the memory of a researcher.
Ask.
Why did he study Physics?
It's still not a common career for girls today, let alone when you started.
Reply.
I had a great interest in mathematics.
I was very interested in solving problems.
They told my mother and grandmother “but hey, having a daughter alone you are going to send her to study.
And who is going to take care of you?
And look, in the end it was me who took care of my mother.
At home they always thought that if I was worth studying, then she would study.
In Jaca there were a few more girls who had gone to university, although in careers that were considered more typical of women, such as letters or Pharmacy, and there were also some Law students.
And one thing must be taken into account that perhaps it is not seen in the same way now: at that time, if families had the possibility of giving their children studies, they did so because it was a form of social advancement.
And so it was in mine, in which only one of my mother's cousins had gone to college.
Q.
Were you the only woman in the faculty?
R.
No, I started my degree in 1957, we were twelve students and three of them were girls.
Statistics cannot be made with such a small number, but it is practically the same percentage or higher than that of the girls who are now enrolling in Physics.
Q.
And did they have a teacher?
R.
No, they were all men.
In fact, in 1971 I won the position of Associate Professor at the Faculty of Physics at the University of Zaragoza, where I had studied, and I was the first woman with a permanent Physics professorship at any Spanish university.
Q.
Did you know from the beginning of your degree that what you wanted was to investigate?
R.
No. What I did have was curiosity.
The interest in solving problems, considering something new and seeing how it is solved, seeing what has already been done.
For me, doing a doctorate was like a continuation of continuing to study.
Q.
And why optics?
R.
I could have done theoretical physics, but the professor was going to go to Barcelona, there was also some astronomy and optics.
And I saw the optics more applied, more in line with what he was looking for.
In fact, my thesis was all experimental.
My thesis supervisor was Don Justiniano Casas, who became rector of the University of Zaragoza and president of the CSIC.
It was he who guided me to apply for a scholarship from the British Council that allowed me to do a postdoctoral fellowship outside of Spain, which was not so common then either.
And in 1967 I went to the University of Reading in the UK.
Q.
Did you speak English?
Because it wasn't very common then either...
R.
Well, I was half talking, but I learned more there.
I did know enough to pass the British Council exam for the scholarship.
This step was very important in my career.
What happened is that almost all of them, not all of them because there were branches of physics in which researchers already published internationally, we published in Spanish in Spanish scientific journals.
There was fear of publishing in international journals, fear of how to respond to reviewers.
For me, going to the United Kingdom and working with a leading researcher, Professor Harold Hopkins, helped me lose that fear.
From there I would say "this is sent to an international magazine, they tell you that you have to correct this or that, then it is corrected and that's it", you should not be discouraged by that.
And when I came back and started directing doctoral theses,
Q.
And what was it like to get to the UK?
Because the difference with the Spain of that time must have been abysmal...
R.
For me it was like opening a window to the world.
It was an experience… It was the Beatles, the miniskirt…
Yzuel, during the interview in December.Santi Burgos
Q.
Did you wear a miniskirt?
R.
Yes, I bought some.
But note that I had come a lot to the Institute of Optics of the CSIC in Madrid, where there were more women.
I arrived in the UK and in the laboratory I was the only woman.
But, wow, I didn't consider it much of a problem either, I was used to it.
That, on the one hand, but on the other, it was the opening, reading things that you couldn't read here, participating in acts that were unthinkable here.
It was opening a window in every way, not just the scientific one.
In the social aspect, transport, social security, caught my attention a lot.
And then the possibility of interacting with people from other countries.
Q.
In 1968 you returned to Zaragoza and your research.
How has his career been since then?
R.
I have gone through various fields of optics.
According to him, he saw that it was more useful or that it was easier to obtain financing.
I started with image quality in optical systems, photography systems.
In the United Kingdom I had done theoretical work, a calculation method to take into account aberrations and how this has an effect on the quality of the image it produces.
When I came back we expanded that line to introduce color.
Somewhat later I had the advantage that some of my students were among the first physicists to be in hospitals and so with them we began to apply the same criteria in radiology and scintigraphy that we were applying in optics and which are criteria that were also applied in the one-dimensional signal in communications.
When I arrived at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, I went to optical image recognition, a field that could have been easier to finance and that allowed me to set up a laboratory.
And there the most important contribution was to introduce color.
Imagine, to differentiate one flag from another.
Introducing color gave me international recognition and I began to receive invitations to international congresses, conferences, etc.
Q.
Listening to you speak, it seems that everything has been simple in your research career...
R.
Well, it hasn't always turned out what I expected, but sometimes that's what's important.
In my laboratory at the Autònoma de Barcelona I began to work with spatial light modulators [devices capable of altering the spatial properties of light], which led me into a field of optics called polarization.
But I got a result that I did not expect.
According to the theory something else should have come out.
At the beginning, with my group, we thought: are we measuring wrong?
We did not even dare to send it to publication.
So we had to find out what was happening there and we discovered that by sending the electrical signal, fluctuations are produced in the molecules.
And now those fluctuations that we discovered are one of the parameters provided by the companies that manufacture these modulators.
We had a hard time with the first results, but we found something thanks to them, and that is something that is very enjoyable.
In science you always have to have an open mind.
Q.
And in all this time, have you felt any discrimination for being a woman in a field as masculinized as physics?
A.
Yes. A lot of things have happened to me that I've seen since now... When I was still at the University of Zaragoza, the head of the department, who was also the president of the city's Academy of Sciences, proposed to all my classmates that they enter at the Academy, but not me.
That bothered me and since I'm from Aragon it shows when I'm happy or upset.
He asked me what was wrong and I ended up explaining it to him.
His response was: "But of course I value your work, what happens is that according to the statutes, members of the Academy can only be men."
And it seemed fine to me.
As he had recognized my work, I did not consider anything else.
Now I would have told him: “As you are the president of the Academy, you can have the statutes changed.
What I am not aware of is having been discriminated against in my research work, it may have happened, but I have not been aware of it”.
Q.
Have you given up anything for science?
A.
Well… maybe yes.
I am single, I have had relationships, but I have not gotten married.
Will the fact that I have dedicated so much time and effort to the investigation have had an influence or not?
We do not know.
But I am not aware of having given up anything.
I have really enjoyed supervising doctoral theses.
For me the communication of knowledge is important;
you don't keep it to yourself, you share it with others with whom you go through the hardships that this doesn't come out or the joys that it does come out and they have accepted the article... It has been very gratifying to be with young people who have all the wisdom and everything the push, you can't fall asleep.
I don't have the feeling of resignation.
I have really enjoyed what I have done.
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