Gratitude to the UNAM Mexico faculty.

Thank you for bringing an economist's discipline and a historian's memory to the rectorship of Latin America's great public university, and for defending free public education as a national project.

Thank you for more than 35 years of asking how life began, from gene sequences to whole genomes, and for making evolution a proud public conversation in Mexico.

Thank you for standing guard over the living waters of Cuatro Cienegas and their ancient microbial mats, and for showing the world that a desert oasis can hold answers about early life on Earth.

Thank you for excavating the daily life of Teotihuacan, household by household, and for treating an ancient city's ordinary people as the real story of Mesoamerica.

Thank you for a life in quantum physics lived alongside a life for peace and open science, from the IAEA to founding Latindex, so that Latin American research could be read by everyone.

Thank you for the theory that helps explain how stars are born from collapsing clouds of gas, and for leading Mexican radio astronomy with quiet, exacting excellence.

Thank you for uniting nuclear physics with the science of complexity, and for building the Centro de Ciencias de la Complejidad into a home where disciplines actually talk to each other.

Thank you for tracing the Spanish language through eight centuries of documents, and for giving Mexican Spanish its own dictionary with pride instead of apology.

Thank you for a lifetime with Mexico's forests and their ecology, for leading UNAM through hard years, and for helping build the national inventory of the country's biodiversity into a public good.

Thank you for measuring the chemistry of nebulae so precisely that the universe's history of matter became legible, and for opening the doors of world astronomy to Mexican women.

Thank you for a lifetime of constitutional scholarship in defense of democratic government, and for making the Instituto de Investigaciones Juridicas a beacon for public law across Latin America.