Facultad de Educación
Departamento de Didáctica de las Matemáticas y de las Ciencias Experimentales
Associate Professor (Profesor Titular) of Science Education, University of Salamanca · Principal Investigator, EMC³ Research Group
Camilo Ruiz is a physicist who became a science-education researcher. His work studies how people build competence on complex scientific problems such as climate change, how to measure that competence rigorously, and how to design learning technologies that change it at scale.
He trained as a computational and experimental physicist. He earned his PhD in Physics at the University of Salamanca (2005, summa cum laude) with a thesis on few-electron systems in intense laser fields. He then held postdoctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden and at Imperial College London, followed by a five-year Ramón y Cajal fellowship at Spain’s Pulsed Laser Centre (CLPU). He has published more than 70 physics journal articles, including several in Physical Review Letters. This work covers ab initio numerical solution of the time-dependent Schrödinger equation, attosecond physics, and laser-driven X-ray and particle sources. It also includes an industry–academia project on laser-based phase-contrast X-ray imaging.
Since 2015 he has applied that quantitative toolkit to education. His group develops and validates measurement instruments, such as a climate-change competence scale validated across Spain and Honduras. It models how knowledge, emotions and action relate using mediation and moderation analyses, and it works with large-scale assessment data from PISA and TIMSS. The group also evaluates learning technologies at scale, including teacher-training MOOCs with more than a thousand participants, augmented reality in STEM classrooms, and NOAA’s Science On a Sphere.
He is PI or co-PI of EU- and nationally funded projects (EL-BONGO Physics, EduHeat, EduC3, XPHASE-LASER). He has led the E_MC³ research group since 2020 and has directed the Consolidated Research Unit UIC 366 of Castile and León since 2026. He has supervised five completed PhD theses, including a joint doctorate with École Polytechnique, and is supervising three more. He holds four consecutive six-year research-merit awards (sexenios) covering 2001–2024.
Interests: measurement of complex competences · learning at scale · educational technology · computational modelling · science and climate communication
Email: camilo@usal.es
ORCID: 0000-0001-9538-5780
SCOPUS Author ID: 8351146200
WoS Researcher ID: A-5024-2014
RESEARCHGATE: Camilo-Ruiz-3