Jonas Marie Dumdum

Jonas Marie Dumdum is currently the Resident Scientist for Salin Philippines, a social enterprise startup that promotes the practice of refilling as a way to avoid the practice of single use plastic use, as part of the new normal. He acts as the team’s lead experimenter on sustainable packaging and its effects to the products that the startup is promoting. He is also an Associate Consultant for Sustainability at GCSS Inc, a company that helps Philippine-listed companies disclose their sustainability initiatives as required by international frameworks and ESG benchmarks. This includes greenhouse gas accounting, converting fuel, electricity, and other operations data of companies to carbon dioxide equivalent emissions.

Fascinated with Chemistry since high school, Jonas pursued and finished an undergraduate degree in Chemistry from the University of the Philippines Los Baños. Since graduating in 2015, he began to explore alternative energies, leading to him to take up and finishing his masters of science degree in Renewable Energy and Resource Management from the University of South Wales in 2017. He continued pursuing renewable energy and waste management science as he believes this will be vital to mitigating the effects of climate change and improve the global environment by 2050.

Wanting to advance the field of STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) in high school students, Jonas joined SIDHI. He wanted to show high school students that STEM is worth exploring. Since 2018, he mentored for SIDHI with two high school students from Laguna under his wing. He shares, even if the communication is difficult, his students were able to share their research for him to mentor on.

As a mentor, Jonas will be firm, and very much willing to shares his experiences in STEM as a way for students to learn lessons and achieve a lot on their research topics.

If there’s one piece of advice he will give future Filipino Scientists, “Aspire for self-change for you to change the world”.