Alejandro Mundo - Alejandro Mundo

Inspiring and engaging, Alejandro Mundo positively impacts students, colleagues and the Kingsbridge International High School, a public school in the Bronx, New York. Mundo knows his students can do anything—and he helps them believe it too. Ever since becoming an educator and the head of the science department, he has opened a new world of opportunities in science, technology and engineering for his students, who engage in hands-on learning opportunities in all his classes. In Earth Science, students learn scientific concepts not from lectures, textbooks or memorization but through manipulatives and lab experiences that illustrate the concepts.

Mundo is known for raising minority young scientists and encouraging them to pursue STEM careers. His constant approach on informal learning including science institutions and trips to the American Museum of Natural History, allows his students to investigate science in practical ways. He has taken the lead on students’ involvement in community leadership; his focus on schoolwide diversity in science careers led to the creation of his science club, where students not only do science in fun ways inside the classroom, but go out to plant trees, clean parks, attend science community engagement events in order to demonstrate leadership and citizenship responsibility for a better world.

In 2019 he was involved in a National Science Foundation grant that focused on early evolution of animals through the study of the trilobite fossil record in New York where he did paleontology fieldwork and facilitated the integration of these experiences both at the American Museum of Natural History and his students. He has done geologic research in Riverside Park in Manhattan to analyze the pressure-temperature at peak metamorphism and determine the mineralogical composition using the Raman spectroscopy geothermobarometer to study the metamorphism of Manhattan.

His scientific research focuses on environmental sustainability and climate change. He is especially interested in understanding the climate processes that affect urban environments, like the Urban Heat Island Effect, using a remote sensing aspect like Landsat satellite data from past and present distributions of land surface temperatures, calculating normalized difference vegetation indices, as well as making future projections. He is currently working as an associate researcher on the Earth Observation Applications for Resiliency research project at the Climate Change Research Initiative at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. His interests include producing mitigation factors in afflicted urban areas due to climate change. He has held multiple STEM engagement events among the community including students, parents, educators and general public in both English and Spanish and has recently been featured as a speaker at the NASA’s STEM STARS En Español program.

Mundo arrived to the United States when he was 12 years old; facing the barriers of a new language, customs and culture, he used those obstacles to overcome his fears and achieve the American Dream. He earned a bachelor’s degree in geological sciences and a minor in science, technology and society from the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona in 2015, and a master’s in teaching earth sciences from the Gilder Graduate School from the American Museum of Natural History in 2017. His professional goal is to build strong relationships with other educators, do meaningful discoveries through scientific research and inspire future generations of minority students to get a STEM career.