History

In accordance with the CONACYT objectives, established since the beginning, of fomenting a competitive culture based on the scientific and technological development, guided always by the politics and objectives of the Technological and Science Indicative Plan of 1976-1982, the council named the Centro de Investigaciones en Óptica, Asociación Civil (CIO) in the city of León, Guanajuato. Such process had its legal start on April 18, 1980, in a protocol act in which the constitutive act of the new institution was made were the high rank government signed the act: Dr. Edmundo Flores, General Director of CONACYT, Dr. Guillermo Soberón Acevedo, UNAM Rector, Lic. Enrique Velasco Ibarra, ruling Governor of Guanajuato, and Lic. Harold Gabriel Appetl, ruling Mayor of the city of León, Guanajuato.

The signature of the act was the ending of previous challenges, work and success whose leader was Dr. Daniel Malacara Hernández, who was the first Mexican scientific to have a Doctorate in Optics in the University of Rochester in 1965, and actual researcher with the benefits of S.N.I, obligatory reference in the development of the optics around the world. Was at that time and from different leaderships, academic and scientific positions in UNAM and INAOE, worked convinced of the necessity of creating in Mexico a scientific institution of the highest level dedicated exclusively to the development of the optics field, an important part of knowledge that as was said by himself, is a fundamental piece and strategic base of important and valuable science and technology developments.

Driven by the motivation of making this idea real, many personalities known by their academic work with different approaches were part of making the idea real, such as Dr. Arcadio Poveda Ricalde, who develop first, the scientific involvement in, the then student, Malacara, as his professor in different classes in UNAM and get him involved in the Instituto de Astronomia, being also his thesis tutor to graduate from physics, and supporting him afterwards in INAOE and the foundation of CIO. He also receive support from Dr. Guillermo Haro Barraza, who got him involved in the transformation project of the National Institute of Astrophysics Observatory, as well as supporting him in the creation of CIO. A similar importance had the governmental personalities that were on those positions a previous period of the constitutive act given the fact that they were the ones who nurtured the idea and help develop it so that the foundation of CIO came in with good terms into Guanajuato and the city of Leon, in a scene that had multiple states competing to receive the CIO. The people responsible were Lic. Luis H. Ducoing Gamba as governor of the state and C. Roberto Plascencia Saldaña as supreme authority of the Municipal Council of the city of Leon at the time.