ICTP Associates Video Series

The ICTP Associates Programme is celebrating its 60th Anniversary this year. This important milestone will be marked by a three-day event that is taking place from 1 to 3 July 2024. As the celebrations are approaching, ICTP is releasing the video series “Science is Our Common Language”, featuring some of the current associates.

The third episode in the series is dedicated to Darwin Barayang Putungan, a computational physicist and a professor at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Physics at the University of the Philippines Los Baños. In his work, Putungan uses theoretical and numerical tools such as density functional theory calculations to study the electronic structure of materials.

In 2019 he became an ICTP Junior Associate in the Condensed Matter and Statistical Physics section and he has since visited the Centre twice.  

Meet him in this new video:

Putungan obtained a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in physics in the Philippines before moving to the National Taiwan University for his PhD. In 2015 he returned to the University of the Philippines Los Baños, where he had studied as an undergraduate and where he has been working since.

Meet the protagonists of previous episodes in the series “Science is Our Common Language”:

• Luis Foa Torres, a professor of physics at the University of Chile in Santiago, Chile
• Imrana Ashraf, professor at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan

The ICTP Associates Programme was started by ICTP founder Abdus Salam at the very inception of the Centre, and it allows researchers from developing countries to build and maintain networks of connections with other researchers, both at ICTP and elsewhere, by giving them the opportunity to regularly spend time at the Centre during their associateship. By offering a solution to the sense of isolation that scientists working in developing countries often experience, the Programme intends to fight brain drain.