| José Manuel Santana Silvestre | |
|---|---|
| Born | April 25, 1962 Santo Domingo Dominican Republic |
| Occupation | Ambassador - Executive Director |
| Spouse | Euridicis Romero de Santana |
| Children | Four |
| Website | |
| CIACT | |
José Manuel Santana Silvestre, (born in Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic April 5, 1962) is a Dominican economist, specialist in Technology and Development. He is the Executive Director of the Dominican Republic International Commission of Science & Technology (CIACT in Spanish) with the rank of Ambassador. He is also a Research Affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.
Santana attended local high schools in the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica including Calasanz and Vargas Calvo, as well as the University of Costa Rica. Because of his youth background during his formative years Santana identified with the Central American social activist movement where he joined the opposition against the Somoza dictatorship. He helps as a humanitarian volunteer n the efforts to rebuild Nicaragua and in the nationwide literacy campaign.
Disappointed by the path that took the revolutionary process in Central America, particularly as a result of the impact created by the horrendous assassination of Mélida Anaya Montes (Comandate Ana Maria), by her own fellows organization members of the Fuerzas Populares de Liberación "Farabundo Martí" (FPL), he moved back to the Dominican Republic focusing in finishing his Bachelor in Economics at the Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo (INTEC)
From 1999 to 2001, Santana attended the Executive Information Technology Management program at Columbia University in New York. Since 2003 he became a Research Affiliate at MIT, first at the RFID-Lab, developing project in Latin America with Radio Frequency Identification Technology in Supply Chain Management. In 2005 he joined the Media Lab, helping in the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, launched by Nicholas Negroponte and in 2007 at the Department of Linguistic and Philosophy with Professor Noam Chomsky.
In September 2004, Santana was appointed by the President of the Dominican Republic, Leonel Fernández, to take on the role of Executive Director of the International Commission of Science and Technology, since then he has worked and/or developed very important initiative in Science, Technology and Education, among them:
Open Knowledge (OCW for the Dominican Republic) Changing the World 1 A 1 One Laptop Per Child Open Learning Exchange My Trip to NASA Science Fair Global Foundation for Democracy and Development New York Task Force Young Peoples Chorus for the Dominican Republic Cachote Scientific Research Station (Barahona) Potential Inclusion in the Kyoto's Protocol for Clean Development Mechanism Environmental and Renewable Energy Consortium Pro Sustainable America
He has lecture about Technology, Development and Education in many different institutions, such as Harvard University, Yale University, MIT,The International Computer Learning Conference in Austria, GS1-Chile, Italy, Venezuela and University of Ilmenau in Germany.