L'Oréal-UNESCO 'Women in Science' awards for five Spanish researchers

FIVE ladies in Spain have been given L'Oréal awards for their research and discoveries to mark International Women and Girls in Science Day.

This is celebrated annually on February 11, and young women – aged under 40 – all over the world are given cash prizes to help them continue in their work.

The L'Oréal-UNESCO 'For Women In Science' programme means each of the winners gets €15,000 after being picked by a panel of prestigious judges – all eminent experts in their scientific fields.

This year, in Spain, the judges are Professor Susana Marcos, head of research at the Visual and Biophotonic Optical Institute, part of the National Research Council (CSIC); head of Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) Mateo Valero; head of the Faculty of Algebra at Madrid's Complutense University, Carlos Andradas, and Professor Pilar López Sancho, who teaches research at Madrid's Material Sciences Institute, affiliated to the CSIC.

Women in five different regions in the world are chosen, and the first of these went to a Spanish woman at the beginning of the year 2000, to Margarita Salas.

Since then, 72 female researchers in Spain have received a total award pot of €1.2 million.

Worldwide, the awards have been present since 1998 and have been presented to 3,600 female scientists.

Nowadays, they encompass 117 countries, and five women per year in each of the five world regions covered receive them.

Several L'Oréal-UNESCO award-winners have since gone on to receive Nobel Prizes in their fields.

They alternate bi-annually between life-sciences and sciences of matter – the year 2020 and next year, 2022, will see life-science awards being granted; this year, sciences of matter got the cash.

The past year has shown more than ever before how crucial it is to continue to develop the STEM subjects – Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths – and recruit more and more young people from their school days onwards, and has highlighted what professionals in these sectors have always known and never been able to fully get across to global governments: That investment in these fields is literally life-saving.

All four areas of expertise are closely linked to everything from human health to combating climate change, and for developing the kind of workplace, domestic, leisure and communications solutions that the planet's population relies on more and more each year.

A campaign has been launched to keep this awareness alive, under the hashtag #QueremosCiencia ('We Want Science').

The Spanish women in receipt of the L'Oréal-UNESCO awards include María Retuerto, of the CSIC-affiliated Catalysis and Petrochemical Institute, who is working on creating technologies for amassing renewable energy in 'green hydrogen' (H2) format for use as fuel, cutting down on air pollution.

Another is Sonia Ruiz Raga, of the Catalunya Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2), whose research focuses on creating devices for converting sunlight into an effective, cheap, long-lasting and sustainable form of energy.

On the physics and engineering side, Clara Cuesta, of the Energetic, Environmental and Technological Research Centre (CIEMAT), is studying the properties of neutrinos – key particles in our universe – in an attempt to better understand how they work, where they originate from, and what leads to the disappearance of anti-matter; her results will be valuable in developing latest-generation technological applications for industry.

Along different lines but in a similar field, Jezabel Curbelo, from Catalunya Polytechnic's Faculty of Mathematics, is analysing how liquids evolve in nature by using equations that model them, in order to gain a better understanding of how the inside of the Earth, and other planets, functions. 

Her aim is to develop applied mathematical tools that can be used widely in the world of geophysics in the short-term future.

Finally, and this time in the field of health sciences, Judith Birkenfeld of the CSIC's Optical Institute is attempting to develop a tool that detects, as early as possible, the onset of keratoconus, a disease of the cornea which affects one in every 2,000 people in Spain, tends to appear at a very young age – typically between 16 and 25 – leads to the cornea becoming thinner and deformed, losing strength and structure, and as well as being very painful, leads to inflammation, reduction in or even total loss of eyesight, and extreme sensitivity to light.