From Osorno to Global Recognition: Chile's Most-Cited Scientist

At thirteen years old, José Rodríguez climbed aboard a train in 1967 with nothing but a small bag and the kind of restlessness that makes a child leave home. He was heading from Rahue, a rural area west of Osorno, to Valparaíso—a journey his grandmother had quietly encouraged when she saw the fire in him. "I was kind of a rebel," he recalls now, seventy-two years old and the most-cited Chilean scientist in the world. "I wanted to make my own life."

That impulse to move, to learn, to build something—it never left him. He enrolled in electronics at José Miguel Carrera, a technical school attached to Federico Santa María University, drawn to the field by little more than the sound of the word and the promise of radios and televisions. The choice was almost accidental, but it became his life's work. After finishing his technical degree, he stayed at the same university to study electrical engineering, then remained as a professor. When the opportunity came to pursue a doctorate, he did what he had always done: he left. This time it was for Erlangen, in southern Germany.

The cultural shock was real. Germans greeted with handshakes, not embraces. They were formal, distant in manner, yet somehow more loyal in friendship. He lived with a German family and spent two months in intensive language study, absorbing both the tongue and the customs. In three years there, he specialized in power electronics—the science of converting and controlling electrical energy. How do you turn the mechanical spin of a wind turbine into electricity? How do you take the stored energy in an electric car's battery and convert it into motion? These were the questions that would define his career.

His work on multilevel inverters—devices that transform direct current into alternating current, essential for electric vehicles and renewable energy systems—became foundational to the field. One of his papers, published in the prestigious Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers journal, became the most-cited article in that publication's entire history. "I had the luck that the world became strongly electrical," he says with characteristic humility. The world was electrifying, and he had spent decades preparing for exactly that moment.

Over his career, Rodríguez directed departments, research centers, and universities. He served on Chile's first Presidential Advisory Council for Higher Education and led more than thirty Fondecyt research projects. Since 2023, he has directed the Energy Transition Center at Universidad San Sebastián, an institution he helped establish to accelerate the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy. In less than two years under his leadership, the university climbed to second place nationally in electrical engineering and electronics, according to the 2025 Shanghai Ranking.

When he began his career, scientists were invisible to the public—"just guys in white coats locked in laboratories," as he puts it. Now they appear on television, offer opinions on policy, shape public understanding. He welcomes this shift. "For the decisions we have to make, we need scientific opinions based on evidence," he says. But he worries about the infrastructure that makes such work possible. Chile invests less than 0.4 percent of its GDP in research and development, while OCDE countries spend more than 2 percent. "It's a pending task," he says. "Investing in research is good for the country. We'll make better decisions. The quality of everything we produce will increase. Young people studying and researching—that's pure win-win for the country." The boy who left home on a train to build his own life now spends his time trying to convince a nation that the future belongs to those willing to invest in it.