Jorge is the best-selling and Emmy-nominated creator of "PHD Comics", the popular ongoing comic strip about life (or the lack thereof) in Academia. He is the co-creator and co-Executive Producer of the celebrated animated series Elinor Wonders Why, which airs on PBS Kids and in 78 countries around the world. He is the co-author of the award-winning book We Have No Idea and its follow-up Out Of Your Mind, and the producer and host of the iHeart Radio show ScienceStuff. He is also the co-founder of PHDtv, a video science and discovery outreach collaborative, and the author of the celebrated book series Oliver's Great Big Universe.
Jorge earned his Ph.D. in Robotics from Stanford University and was an Instructor and Research Associate at Caltech from 2003-2005. He is originally from Panama.
Jorge earned his Bachelor's of Science from Georgia Tech.
In 2009, he was awarded the 2009 NSF/AAAS International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge First Place in Informational Graphics with his collaborator Dwayne Godwin, a professor of Neuroscience at Wake Forest University. Their comics about the brain appeared in Scientific American Mind from 2010-2017.
In 2011, PHD Comics was adapted into a feature-length film called "The PHD Movie", which screened at over 500 locations worldwide, including all 7 continents. A sequel titled, "The PHD Movie 2: Still in Grad School" was produced in 2015 and also screened worldwide. Nature Journal called the movie "Astute, funny" while the New York Times wrote, "Well, Postdocs think it's funny."
To date, he has delivered over 400 invited lectures internationally on his experiences in academia and being an independent artist and science communicator.
The PHD Comics website has been visited by over 60 million visitors in the last 10 years.
Six book collections of his comics have been published (available in stores and online).
"We Have No Idea," his book co-written with physicist Daniel Whiteson was published May 2017 by Riverhead Books/Penguin Random House and was a Der Spiegel Best-Seller. The book won the Wenjin National Book Award in China.