Being a vocational scientist in a private company

There’s an idea that circulates far too often and deserves to be questioned: that science only happens in universities, research centers, and foundations. That companies, by definition, don’t do real science. That if you cross over into the private sector, you somehow stop being a scientist.

That’s not true. And I say this from the experience of someone who has spent twenty years in research, who has moved in and out of both the academic world and the private one, and who today works at Zenithal Blue precisely because here he can keep being what he has been his whole life: a scientist.

A scientific vocation isn’t a profession. It’s a way of being

When I say I’m a vocational scientist, I don’t just mean that I work in science. I mean something deeper. University teaches you to think; it teaches you to apply the scientific method. But the vocation comes before that: it’s something you find in your life that defines who you are. For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a researcher. And even when you dedicate yourself to it professionally, once that vocation has been with you for a long time, you essentially shape your life and your way of thinking around it.

It’s a vocation similar to that of someone who decides to be religious, or who has an artistic or musical calling. You don’t entirely choose it. You recognize it.

Why Zenithal Blue

One of the reasons I enjoy working at Zenithal Blue is that the founder, Roger Oliva, supports a more academic vision of how to do things. We have PhD students, we host master’s theses, and we support academic development while pursuing scientific excellence. That’s not common in a private company, and it shouldn’t be taken for granted.

We work as scientists and engineers with innate curiosity. And we also benefit from a flexibility that other environments, especially public ones, can’t always offer. That combination, academic rigor with the agility of a company, is hard to find, and when you find it, it’s worth taking care of.

On the Earth observation community

There’s no university degree that certifies you as an “Earth observation scientist.” It’s a title that all of us impose on ourselves. Those who, from different disciplines and different countries, have decided to devote our careers to understanding the planet from space.

And within that community there’s something I find especially valuable: a high degree of internationalization, where people from very different cultures and countries find common ground in wanting to work together to address the great challenges. There’s a lot of unity around what the goals are, what we want to achieve, and why it matters.

New Space, satellite constellations, the democratization of access to space… none of that would have been possible without nearly 75 years of intense work, international collaboration, and knowledge transfer between institutions and companies. We’re inheriting an enormous legacy, and we have a responsibility to keep building on it.

What science in a company shouldn’t mean

Working in a company doesn’t mean abandoning rigor, nor that results are predetermined by whoever provides the funding, nor even that curiosity becomes subordinate to the commercial margin. In the best case, it means you can apply that rigor to real problems, with real resources, and with the possibility of seeing results that go further and faster than they would from a public institution with long, uncertain funding cycles.

That’s what I try to do. And it’s what, at Zenithal Blue, I have the freedom to do.