Miguel Alejandro Rodríguez

Miguel Alejandro Rodríguez is an award-winning Argentine science and technology teacher whose classroom and community projects have transformed opportunities for young people from vulnerable backgrounds. Based in a public technical school in Palermo, Buenos Aires, he has spent more than twenty-seven years teaching electronics and technology while turning limited resources into engines for social change.

Miguel is a 2025 City Teacher Awards recipient and the national winner of the Energy Globe Award 2024 for Argentina, recognising his pioneering environmental education projects. In the same year, he received the Mercosur Science and Technology Award 2024 and was a finalist for the Swiss Embassy’s Positive Actions Award, underlining the regional impact of his work. His students’ research on detecting microorganisms in water and other project-based learning initiatives have been widely published and showcased.

Over the course of his career, Miguel has won or been recognised by many prestigious awards: the Argentine Junior Water Award 2023, finalist for the Zayed Sustainability Prize 2023, Innovar 2022, FGP 2022 Regional Winners Award, an Honorable Mention in the Dubai International Award 2013, the La Nación Foundation Solidarity Project Award 2011, the YPF Foundation Award 2008, and an Honorable Mention in the Mercosur Science and Technology Award 2008. Each distinction reflects his ability to connect high-level science with real-world impact for communities in need.

For the past thirteen years, Miguel has personally funded and directed the Cóndor Science Club, a space that welcomes students from multiple schools, many of them out-of-school or from highly vulnerable contexts. Through this club, he formally includes them in national and international competitions, ensuring that talent is not limited by postcode, income, or family circumstance. His projects often serve Indigenous rural communities, providing low-cost technologies for renewable energy, safe water, environmental remediation, and food security.

Miguel replaces traditional exams with collaborative, project-based learning that asks students to design solutions to real problems: solar cookers and heaters, biodigesters, recycled solar panels, biofilters, humidity sensors for school gardens, and circular-economy initiatives such as growing edible mushrooms from organic waste. In his classroom and workshop, mistakes are embraced as part of learning, and creativity compensates for scarce equipment and materials.

Beyond school hours, Miguel hosts weekend sessions, coordinates community partnerships, supports families in crisis, and mentors teachers across Argentina, including those in rural Indigenous schools. He shares his methodology at conferences, science fairs, and in educational media, promoting science as a tool for equity, climate action, and social justice.

Coming from a humble background himself, Miguel is driven by a simple conviction: education and science must serve inclusion, justice, and transformation. His greatest achievement, he believes, is creating spaces where a single LED lighting up on a student’s circuit board can ignite a lifelong sense of possibility – proof that with support, creativity, and perseverance, young people can change both their own lives and those of their communities.