Lyne Starling Trimble Public Event Series
Physics on the Move: Technical Assistance for Development in Latin America
Gisela Mateos, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Monday, August 4, 2025
Sixth AIP Early-Career Conference keynote lecture
Salvador, Brazil
Attendance at this lecture is limited to conference participants. A video will be made available afterward.
Abstract
Gisela Mateos
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and its technical assistance programs set in place a machinery that mobilized experts in the field of nuclear science and technology. Established in 1957, it became an essential tool for the internationalization and standardization of atomic technologies and practices and for promoting geopolitical influence in the Third World. One of Latin America’s first IAEA technical assistance activities was the Mobile Radioisotope Exhibition, which began in Mexico in 1959. It marks the beginning of a series of programs that mobilized people, knowledge, and materialities. This talk will delve into how IAEA’s resources were leveraged through technical assistance programs for local scientific and institutional goals during the 1960s and 1970s, embedded in the discourse of development, the intersection of international scientific collaboration, political interests, and technologies.
Speaker Biography
Gisela Mateos is full professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Her main research interests are the history of 20th-century science (particularly physics) and technology in Mexico and Latin America. She focuses on how technical assistance programs have moved scientific and medical practices between socialist countries and the so-called Third World. For the last ten years, she has collaborated with Edna Suárez-Díaz on the history of science in Mexico during the Cold War. They recently edited the volume Interrogating Development: The Mobilization of Sciences and Technologies, and Technical Assistance in Postwar Mexico, and contributed the chapter, “A ‘most ambitious project´: Promises of Water and Atoms in the Mexico–US border.” Their article “How the United States Learned to Commodify the Transnational Atom” appeared in History and Technology in 2024.
Top photo: A mobile radioisotope laboratory donated by the United States to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Photo credit: IAEA.