He is 35 years old, he is from Los Realejos and he does not stop accumulating prizes for his investigations. Jezabel Curbelo is a young promise in mathematics who currently lives in Barcelona after having been the youngest scientist to win a Ramón y Cajal contract in the 2018 call to work at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (CPU), in the Department of Mathematics, where he investigates the applications of mathematics to earth sciences, in particular geophysics, and more specifically, the displacement and movement of the earth’s fluids such as the oceans, the atmosphere, or the magna.
Jezebel studies the movement of fluids through tools math such as simulations or dynamic systems, which allow the identification of certain geometric structures or patterns that help to characterize the movement or dynamics of terrestrial fluids.
She lives “attached” to the computer, in her case, a “very powerful” one to, through databases that have measurements by means of satellites, make large simulations that include a significant amount of data. In this sense, computing has evolved a lot in recent years and allows for more ambitious calculations that were unthinkable when he began studying because there were no resources for it.
“I always say that my laptop is a gateway to other computers in the world,” he confesses.
His current field of research is a continuation of his doctoral thesis, which he began when he finished his degree at the University of La Laguna (ULL) in 2009. The following year he did a master’s degree and then a doctorate in Mathematics at the Autonomous University of Madrid ( UAM). Her thesis won the international Donald L. Turcotte Award from the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and she is, to date, the only Spaniard to have done so.
A succession of awards for the young mathematician from Los Realejos
From there came a succession of recognitions that have increased the trajectory of this young royal promise. One of them is the L’Oréal Unesco Award for Women in Science, being the first and only mathematician to have achieved it in Spain.
“It is an award for women scientists who are in an intermediate stage of their career and it is very significant because it gives financial aid -15,000 euros- to carry out research and a lot of visibility at a time when we really need it,” she declares.
Despite her outstanding career, Jezebel has to face the same obstacles as any young scientist in this country, regardless of gender, in order to achieve job stability. “There is not enough aid, we cannot find work and we are waiting for a stability that does not come. After four years of thesis, they tell you that you have to go abroad, you leave, you come back, they ask you to go on and on, and you are always waiting for a temporary contract”, he maintains.
“You go from scholarship to scholarship and from aid to aid, you have to be asking for many things to get one and the time invested in all that process is complicated, and if that process, in addition, takes many years, it tires you out. And the worst thing is that you lose a lot of time in bureaucracy and that is what wears you out the most,” she says. That is the reality of him and that of the vast majority of colleagues and colleagues.
She did a postdoctoral stay in Lyon, France, she was a Juan de la Cierva researcher at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, an assistant professor at the UAM and has carried out different stays at the University of California, Los Angeles.
However, he clarifies that it also depends on how each person deals with this instability. “Because it doesn’t just depend on the city you live in, you’re always on the lookout for a suitcase without knowing what’s going to happen two years from now and that can affect your work in general. I think that what young people lack is money, stability and investment”, adds the young scientist.
And being a woman adds to the inconvenience of trying to fit in with motherhood, “because research is a job where you have to be very up-to-date with things that are happening around you, reading constantly, in which you can’t take vacations and a maternity leave makes you lose the thread and it is difficult to pick it up again”.
Her childhood dream: to be a teacher
As a child she wanted to be a teacher because her parents are teachers too, just like her grandmother Conchita, who was the teacher at the girls’ school in the Tigaiga nucleus, and for her she was “her idol”. She was known as ‘Conchita, David’s’ -because that was her father’s name- and she was a well-liked person in the municipality.
He always liked numbers and did not have a good memory. The subjects of retaining concepts and memorizing them cost him more, while in the case of mathematics “he associated them with solving problems and that seemed to me like a hobby, a riddle.” He just had to face the problem and think about its solution.
At the beginning it was considered to do an engineering. “From the Canary Islands you saw that perhaps the clearest way out of studying mathematics was to teach because there are no large companies or industries”, but in the end he entered Mathematics thanks to the Mathematical Olympiads that he attended in the last year of high school representing his institute , the Pureza de María school, and the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the national phase and he does not regret his decision at all. She now dedicates herself to research and loves it, although the young royal never imagined that the numbers would take her to the interior of the earth.
His first works at the ULL have been on harmonic analysis, a very theoretical branch, but over the years and as a consequence of his doctoral thesis carried out at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, it is a joint institute of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (ICMAT). ) has focused more on applications.
He confesses that on more than one occasion he has considered leaving the investigation. “I think that many young people who are dedicated to this think so, especially when the bureaucracy accumulates, there are things that do not work out for you, and even when you see that you would earn much more money if you worked in something else, because in a company or Mathematicians are highly valued in industry. I suppose that is why it is also difficult to find teachers who teach this subject in high schools”.
She hasn’t done so yet. Jezebel in Hebrew means ‘God’s oath’ and she, faithful to the origin of her name, has sworn to be faithful to research and numbers.
