Scholar Spotlight: Oscar Cantua

The third TAURUS Scholar Spotlight of the summer is all about Oscar Cantua, who is a physics major at the University of Texas San Antonio just 100 miles down the road from us in Austin.  Oscar is working with Dr. Jorge Zavala this summer on the characterization of some of the Universe's most luminous and dusty galaxies.

This summer Oscar Cantua is joining us from a familiar institution that is also a part of the UT System: the University of Texas at San Antonio. Despite being in the same state — less than 100 miles from his hometown and in the same educational system — this research experience in TAURUS represents a new world of opportunities to pursue his future career in astronomy, Oscar says.

Oscar’s interest in astronomy goes back to his childhood when he first moved to the US from Mexico and used to read a lot of books to learn English. He soon realized that science books, and particularly astronomy-related stories were the most interesting to him. Some years later, astronomy went from being only a hobby to a potential professional career after he spent a summer working at the NASA Johnson Space Center (yes, NASA!) as part of the Texas High School Aerospace Program. Nowadays at UTSA, Oscar is a physics major with a minor in astronomy. 

Oscar is part of the UTSA’s Top Scholar program, which combines a comprehensive four-year merit-based scholarship with personalized experiences in academics, leadership and community service. Thanks to this opportunity, he was able to become involved in scientific research at an early stage in his college career, analyzing data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory in order to study the nature of binary systems in nearby galaxies, under the supervision of Prof. Eric Schlegel. This summer at UT Austin, Oscar is jumping wavelengths from the very short and energetic part of the spectrum to the longest wavelengths observations achieved with the most powerful radio telescopes in the world, in order to identify and study the most distant dusty star-forming galaxies in the Universe. 

While looking back in the past, Oscar realized that it has not been easy to reach this point in his professional life.  Being a first generation college student, living far away from his family, and having to work while studying. Now he is closer to his dream of going to graduate school, not only with passion and enthusiasm for astrophysics but also with a lot of knowledge and experience. 

When I asked Oscar to give advice to young people, particularly to those belonging to underrepresented groups like him, he simply said "never stop chasing your dreams.”