Jonatan was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, and he has always been interested in socio-environmental problems and passionate about finding new ways to address them. He first graduated from International Relations (2007) in ITESO, the Jesuit University of Guadalajara, where he learned how economics, culture, and politics influence international conflict and cooperation, but above all, the ethics of serving the underprivileged and the urge to transform the world.
He worked in the Political Ecology research program of ITESO, where he met inspiring colleagues that soon became close friends. He then studied for a master’s in social sciences, specialising in Sustainable Development (2010) at the University of Guadalajara. He studied and analysed the socio-environmental complexity of the most polluted river in Mexico. He concluded that grassroots movements are key actors in transforming this bleak reality because the configuration of legal, technical, and socio-political dynamics of actors maintained the polluted status quo of the Santiago River, Mexico.
For the next years, he embarked on a quest to actively change the state of the environmental problems of different parts of Jalisco, Mexico. First, he co-managed a team of interdisciplinary researchers to understand the socio-environmental problems of the Chapala basin, a region comprising several municipalities and Lake Chapala, the largest in Mexico. He proposed a route map based on territorial planning to ensure the sustainable development of the basin. Second, he and a colleague launched the project Recuperación de Ríos, funded by the Gonzalo Río Arronte Foundation, to develop low-tech infrastructure through citizen science to provide clean water for rural communities.
In September 2015, he received a scholarship from CONACyT, the National Council of Science and Technology of Mexico, to embark on his PhD at UNESCO-IHE (IHE Delft). During his research, he decided to embrace inter- and transdisciplinarity by learning technical water knowledge and tools to understand a water conflict better and transform it.
Through learning by doing, he familiarized himself with water resources models and other engineering tools to tinker and experiment with new approaches and methods, such as participatory modelling. He will keep his curiosity and passion intact for the rest of his professional career (and life) to pursue the extravagant and exhilarating sense of possibility on the horizon.
Publications
A complete list of publications can be found in Google Scholar.