Catholic Scientists: Josefina Pérez Mateos

Josefina Pérez Mateos (December 15, 1904 - April 14, 1994), from a military family, was born in Ciudad Rodrigo (Salamanca).

He completed his high school and university studies in Madrid. He then took two degrees, in Pharmacy (1928) and Natural Sciences (1934).

After the Civil War, she earned her living as a professor of Geology at the Central University (1939-1946) and of Agriculture at the Lope de Vega Institute (1939-1943). In addition, she worked in pharmacy and developed a doctoral thesis under the title: “Investigation of color in tourmaline” (later she defended another thesis in Pharmacy, entitled ‘The Spanish scheelites’).

In 1940 he was already a member of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), specifically in the Mineralogy Section of the José de Acosta Institute, where he assembled a collection of minerals mentioned in the Holy Scriptures, and in 1946 he obtained a position as a Scientific Collaborator.

She later moved to the Institute of Soil and Plant Biology, where she was head of the Sedimentary Petrography Section (she also headed the Soil Mineralogy Section at the Institute of Soil and Agrobiology).

In 1949 she was promoted to Research Scientist, the first woman in the history of Spain, and then visited several prestigious institutions in France and Germany to learn their techniques and bring them to Spain.

In 1959 the International Association of Mineralogy was founded in Madrid, of which Josefina was a founding member. She was also head of the Spanish Sedimentology Group (1960-1968), and published emblematic books such as Mineralogical analysis of sands: study methods. Finally, he obtained the highest category of professional scientist in the history of Spain: Research Professor of the CSIC (1971).

After retiring in 1975, he received the Grand Cross of the Order of Alfonso X the Wise. He also belonged to societies such as the Royal Spanish Society of Natural History, the Spanish Society of Soil Science and the Academy of Doctors.

Josefina Pérez Mateos died in Madrid in 1994. Her co-workers recognize that she was a woman of deep faith, and Margarita Pérez Peñasco, niece and Research Assistant at the CSIC, declares that she was: «Very believing, very believing. They proposed her to belong to the Teresian Sisters, to Opus Dei... but she wanted to practice her faith in the Catholic Church without belonging to any of the ecclesiastical realities then existing in Spain».