Dr. Óscar Nájera

Software archeologist – Recovering Physicist – Dancer

Hello there!

You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world.

— Morpheus, The Matrix

Welcome to my turf on the internet, a unique place because it is mine. It isn’t inside a walled garden from a monopolistic Internet mega corporation. Here, in the outskirts of the centralized internet, I’m free to do whatever I want. I set the terms and conditions.

I’m a profoundly curious person, hunting after every new thing. I studied Physics because it was fun. It allowed me to explore the only universe I’ll ever life on. And in its vastness, I found myself most captivated by the small things, the electrons.

My journey unfolded when I moved to a foreign country(France) to pursue my PhD in Strongly Correlated Electrons Systems. Those were amazing and crazy days. I worked to understand how the interactions between electrons affect their collective behavior.

Computers have been the most precious tool and weapon on my journey. Computers aren’t bound by the scarcity of nature, nor the constrains of shape and space. They are a universal simulator and within them you can have anything you want with zero materials cost. Everything is the same distance away, everything has the same manufacturing process, you only have to put the work.

I’m incredibly happy that computers can be in the hands of everybody. Yet it saddens me that we don’t fight to keep ownership of them. Proprietary Software, Vendor Locked Hardware, captured spaces on the internet(the cloud platforms) take the endless possibilities away. You can only do what they tell you to do, and then they make it mandatory to do as they say. I’m always fighting back.

Everything I know, originated by following my curiosity on the Internet. Which is why I believe in keeping it open and free for everybody and the main reason I use and contribute to Freedom and Privacy respecting software(also known as Free Software or worse Open Source). That choice comes at great personal expense, I self host my email, online backups, file shares and source version control system. I have to do it.

Software is more than stuff, it is more than information, it is executable knowledge. If having unread books lying around is a wasted of opportunity, not running software you control is a crime against your intellect. You are a follower of what it does, and you have no idea of how to do it by yourself. That makes it really dangerous.

When I’m not in front of the computer, you can find me dancing. I like to dance West Coast Swing and Salsa the most. Dancing is the most amazing recreation form it is Art and Sport, it is a challenging craftsmanship.

Contact

You made it through that lengthy, text only presentation. Social media platforms haven’t hijacked you attention span. If you want to get in touch, the best way of communication is by email. You can communicate securely with me using GnuPG (If you don’t know about it, it is a good time to learn ). My key-ID has the fingerprint:

7D28 EBAE F208 A715 363D 3C7A BF54 14CD C5E4 73B3

You can verify my linked identity to that key on my keyoxide profile :

Certified Education

CompTIA Data+ Certified

CompTIA

May 2023

ITIL® Foundation Certificate in IT Service Management

AXELOS Global Best Practice

Jan 2023

PhD in Strongly Correlated Electron Systems

Université Paris Saclay (Paris-Sud) – Laboratoire de Physique des Solides

Sep 2014 – Dec 2017

Orsay, France

Dissertation Study of the dimer Hubbard Model within Dynamical Mean Field Theory and its application to VO\(_2\)

Master in Molecular Nano- bio-photonics (MONABIPHOT)

École Normale Supérieure de Cachan

Sep 2013 – Aug 2014

Cachan, France

Mémoire Study of spin-orbit effects in the Mott-Hubbard metal-insulator transition

Physics Diploma

Escuela Politécnica Nacional

Oct 2006 – Aug 2012

Quito, Ecuador

Diploma Thesis Estimation, by computer simulation, of the exchange energy dispersion between polar nano-regions in \(Pb_xBi_4Ti_{3+x}O_{12+3x}; x=\{2,3\}\) relaxor ferroelectrics

German Abitur

Colegio Aleman Quito

Oct 1997 – Jun 2006

Quito, Ecuador

  • German Abitur May 2006
  • Ecuadorian High School Diploma June 2005

Experience

Software Developer

Byteplant GmbH

Sep 2023 – Present

Germany

  • Data processing
  • DevOps
  • Software Development

Software Developer

Tribe29 GmbH

Sep 2018 – Jul 2022

Munich, Germany

  • Entirely responsible for customer communication, design and implementation
    • Time series forecasting engine, Capacity management
    • Time series retrieval mechanism, time-series pre-processor, and graph descriptors
    • Grafana connector
  • Main contributor
    • PDF reporting engine
    • Front-end developer for user interface upgrade particularly: graphs and dashboards.
  • Tools : Python, C/C++, Javascript/TypeScript, Jenkins, Gerrit, Grafana

PhD in Strongly Correlated Electron Systems

Université Paris Saclay (Paris-Sud) – Laboratoire de Physique des Solides

Sep 2014 – Dec 2017

Orsay, France

  • Using the Dynamical mean field theory I implemented its highly complex algorithms and models to generate, process and analyze data for a variety of experiments and theoretical simulations.
  • Responsibilities : Individual research, project planning, manage High Performance computing cluster, write documentation and dissertation
  • Tools : Python, C++, NumPy, SciPy, Sphinx, git, Travis-CI, Ansible

Honors & awards

PhD fellowship

École Doctorale Physique en Île de France

2014

France

Master Scholarship

Campus Paris-Saclay

2013

France

Danced for Ecuador in WDSF World Championship Standard

WDSF

2012

Australia

PAD Preisträger

Kultusminister Konferenz

2003

Germany

Publications

Imaging the nanoscale phase separation in vanadium dioxide thin films at terahertz frequencies

Vanadium dioxide (VO\(_2\)) is a material that undergoes an insulator–metal transition upon heating above 340 K. It remains debated as to whether this electronic transition is driven by a corresponding structural transition or by strong electron–electron correlations. Here, we use apertureless scattering near-field optical microscopy to compare nanoscale images of the transition in VO\(_2\) thin films acquired at both mid-infrared and terahertz frequencies, using a home-built terahertz near-field microscope.
By — H. T. Stinson, A. Sternbach, O Nájera, R. Jing, A. S. Mcleod, T. V. Slusar, A. Mueller, L. Anderegg, H. T. Kim, M. Rozenberg, D. N. Basov

Resolving the VO\(_2\) controversy: Mott mechanism dominates the insulator-to-metal transition

We consider a minimal model to investigate the metal-insulator transition in VO\(_2\). We adopt a Hubbard model with two orbitals per unit cell, which captures the competition between Mott and singlet-dimer localization. We solve the model within dynamical mean-field theory, characterizing in detail the metal-insulator transition and finding new features in the electronic states.
By — Ó. Nájera, M. Civelli, V. Dobrosavljević, M. J. Rozenberg