Born in San Cristobal and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, Dr. Vera was the fifth of seven children whose parents had not graduated from high school yet stressed the point that education was the best path towards a better life. By heeding his parents’ advice and excelling in high school, Dr. Vera earned scholarships throughout his academic career, which culminated in a PhD degree in Energy Management and Policy from the University of Pennsylvania. That doctoral degree opened the doors for a rewarding career in international organizations, including the United Nations.
After his freshman year of college, at the Universidad Simon Bolivar in Caracas, Dr. Vera was among the first group of students to be awarded a scholarship in the Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho program, which supported Venezuelan students studying engineering in the United States. After one year at the Colorado School of Mines, Dr. Vera transferred to the University of Michigan, where he became interested in chemistry and earned a B.S. in chemical engineering in 1978. Instead of following the more obvious path of a career in the petrochemical industry, Dr. Vera opted to work in the water treatment plant at the Planta Centro thermoelectric power plant in Venezuela.
As the chief unit engineer and later the manager of the desalination plant, Dr. Vera was responsible for operating the reverse osmosis plant, at the time the largest in the Western hemisphere, so the electric plant would have the proper type of water for generating the steam to turn the turbines to generate electricity. By 1981, he felt that, to properly manage the plant, he would need a degree in management. The electric power company, CADAFE, gave him a scholarship to pursue an MBA in the management of science, technology and innovation, first at the University of Dallas and then at George Washington University, in Washington D.C.
While at GWU, he found a summer job as the project manager/instructor for an educational program sponsored by NASA, to encourage Hispanic students to explore the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The summer program, supervised by NASA engineer Orlando Gutierrez and managed by Lucy Negron-Evelyn, sought to inspire Hispanic students to aim for something higher in life than society at large usually suggested was possible. In 1983, a NASA Deputy Secretary presented Dr. Vera with an award for his work in the “El Ingeniero” program. Staff at NASA also encouraged Dr. Vera to set his sights on a PhD. After attaining his MBA in 1984, he started with another scholarship from CADAFE to pursue a doctoral degree in energy management and policy. Dr. Vera moved from Washington D.C. to Philadephia as a graduate student at the Energy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Now at UPenn, an opportunity arose for Dr. Vera to conduct a project, funded by CADAFE, to launch an experiment on the NASA space shuttle to see if polymer membranes, used in reverse osmosis, would have significantly different structures if cast in low or no gravity in space, compared to those cast on Earth. For this project, Dr. Vera collaborated with the NASA Bioprocessing Research Center, headed by Dr. Paul Todd. The explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 delayed his work, although the experiment did finally fly on sounding rockets in 1989 and 1990, and on the space shuttle Atlantis in 1991.
Faced with this delay, Dr. Vera took advantage of a totally different opportunity, to study at the French Petroleum Institute (Institut Francais du Petrole) in Paris, France, as part of an exchange program between IFP and the Energy Center in 1986-1987. Upon returning to the United States in 1987, he moved back to the Washington D.C. area and became an energy forecaster at Decision Analysis Corporation (DAC), which provided consulting services to the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE). While working at DAC, Dr. Vera became a citizen of the United States (in 1992) and finished his doctoral program in 1994. Also in 1994, Dr. Vera began to work directly at DoE.
While working at the DoE, Dr. Vera applied for a position at the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA), part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in Paris, France. He moved there with his wife and children in 1995. During the six years he worked at the NEA, Dr. Vera gained experience and expertise in international conferences and meetings devoted to nuclear energy, environmental issues, and the mining of uranium. This gave him the background necessary for his next position as a project manager at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in Vienna, Austria. He and his family moved there in 2001. At the IAEA, Dr. Vera expanded beyond nuclear energy to also become an expert in sustainable energy. During his time there, IAEA and its staff won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 for the agency’s efforts “to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and to ensure that nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is used in the safest possible way.”
After six years in Vienna, in 2007 Dr. Vera earned a position with the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) in the Division for Sustainable Development at UN Headquarters in New York City. While there, he worked as a senior sustainable development officer, participating in the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development in 2012. He later became Chief of the Water, Energy, and Capacity Development Branch at UNDESA, focusing on projects that could promote the use of sustainable energy and water in developing countries while mitigating climate change. Since retiring from the UN in 2017, Dr. Vera continues to contribute to the efforts of international organizations to promote integrated energy and water programs as sustainable solutions to climate change.
TRANSCIENCIA 