By Matin Durrani in Mexico City

It’s one of the biggest universities in the world with several hundred thousand students, but the Universidad Nacional Autonóma de México (UNAM) is certainly not the oldest. In fact, the first person to get a degree and PhD in physics at UNAM – Fernando Alba – is still alive. Aged 95, he studied at UNAM’s Institute of Physics shortly after it opened its doors in 1939.

UNAM is so big that it seemed an obvious first port of call at the start of the Physics World tour of Mexico. You can hardly come to Mexico and not visit UNAM, such is its dominance of the country’s higher-education system.

I spent an hour or so with Manuel Torres, who’d just been reappointed (on Friday, in fact) as director of the institute for a second four-year term. Fresh from a special ceremony to mark the start of his next stint as boss, Torres explained how the institute has 126 full-time physicists, who work in six main areas of research: theory, experiment, complex systems, chemical physics, solid-state physics and condensed-matter physics, although why the latter two areas should be separate areas seemed slightly lost in the mists of time.

I also met Ana-María Cetto, who does research into the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and who’s been at the institute for nearly half a century. “It’s a very good place to work,” she admits. But despite her long track record, Cetto is by no means remote from the world outside UNAM’s verdant campus.

She was chair of the executive committe of Pugwash at the time that it was awarded a share of the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize for trying to rid the world of nuclear weapons, had a seven-year stint between 2003 and 2010 as deputy director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna when it too bagged a Nobel peace prize, and was secretary-general of the International Council of Scientific Unions. Cetto’s also been closely involved in the International Year of Light and helped to set up Mexico City’s Museo de la Luz (Museum of Light) that my colleague James Dacey wrote about yesterday. Not resting on her laurels, Cetto has arranged for the museum to move to a major new purpose-built facility on the UNAM campus.

I also got a guided tour of the some of institute’s experimental facilities by Aleida Rueda, who’s communications officer there. In the video above, you can find out more from Rueda about what it does.