A New Aerospace Rising Star Emerges from IPN

Reporter: Adda Avendaño / Photographer: Jorge Aguilar

ESIME Zacatenco Student Celia Chávez Virgen Receives Scholarship to Attend Congress in Sydney, Australia

With one of 30 scholarships from the Emerging Space Leaders Program, annually awarded by the International Astronautical Federation (IAF), Celia Chávez Virgen, a student at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN), will represent her alma mater and Mexico at the 76th International Astronautical Congress, taking place from September 29 to October 3 in Sydney, Australia.

Chávez Virgen, from the Superior School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering (ESIME) at the Zacatenco Campus, aims to empower vulnerable communities in technological areas. She will present two social projects: a digital inclusion model for marginalized zones and another focused on the inclusion of indigenous women from Tlaxcala. Both initiatives seek to close the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) gap.

While studying Communications and Electronics Engineering, she will also present a third project, developed under the guidance of Dr. Mario Alberto Mendoza Bárcenas from the IPN’s Center for Aerospace Development (CDA). This project involves the installation of a ground station with two-way terrestrial and satellite communication, designed to reduce reliance on foreign stations.

Celia Chávez was also selected as one of 200 participants annually in the Global Research, Immersion, Program for Young Scientists (GRIPS) program, which allowed her to spend two months starting in June at Zhejiang University, China, collaborating on research involving artificial intelligence and advanced language models.

Despite her young age, her expertise earned her acceptance from October 10 to December 26 in the NIMS Internship Program at the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) in Ibaraki, Japan, where she will conduct research on new materials and the integration of Machine Learning into aerospace applications.

Chávez Virgen’s international experience also includes research at the Samara State Aerospace University, Russia; a fully funded semester of academic mobility through the Magalhães/SMILE Program at the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM), Spain; a week-long leadership training program in Canada; and a research summer at Fundación Universitaria “Los Libertadores”, Colombia, through the Dolphin Program – Summer of Scientific Research.

Chávez She also contributes to research on electromagnetic interference analysis, signal mitigation in renewable energy systems, and wind energy flow converters under the supervision of Dr. Raúl Peña Rivero at ESIME Zacatenco, supported by the Institutional Research Training Incentive Scholarship (BEIFI), from 2022 to the present.

Celia Chávez, finalist in the Invent For The Planet (IFTP) competition at Texas A&M University and recipient of both the Best Poster Award at the IPN Institutional Research Forum and the Academic Excellence Award from IPN, believes that Politécnico students have the necessary tools to thrive in academic mobility and research opportunities—they just need to leap.

“I would encourage students to overcome their fear of mobility, work with a researcher, start a new project, attend a conference, or learn a new language. If you are afraid, do it afraid—but take the risk, because we only have one life, and Politécnicos are well-prepared to face any challenge," she emphasized.