The researchers Ivan Briz, Claudia Climent, Clara Juárez, and Albert Gandioso have been given the Beatriz Galindo grants, awarded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (MCIU) to attract the research talent of scientists who are currently developing their professional careers abroad. These grants, which are awarded in the senior and junior categories, were made public on 12 June and will facilitate the recruitment and training of human research capital, as well as their mobility in sectors of strategic national interest to enhance the quality and competitiveness of teaching and research staff at universities throughout Spain.
Ivan Briz, Ivan Briz, a member of the National Scientific and Technological Research Council (CONICET, Argentina), has been awarded the Beatriz Galindo and will carry out his research at the Department of History and Archaeology and the Institute of Archaeology of the University of Barcelona as a senior researcher. Briz will contribute to promoting a new line of work using mass data and complex calculation methodologies (machine learning, network analysis, etc.) from a socio-historical analysis approach. In this academic context, the application of these teachings in the study of social dynamics and socio-historical interpretation becomes a decisive factor in enhancing skills and competences in the framework of teaching and research, both in the social sciences and in the humanities.
Claudia Climent joins the Department of Materials Science and Physical Chemistry of the Faculty of Chemistry and the Institute of Theoretical and Computational Chemistry of the UB (IQTCUB) as a Beatriz Galindo junior researcher. Climent, currently at the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania (USA), received her PhD in Nanoscience from the UB in 2017 and is an expert in the fields of light-matter interactions, polaritonic chemistry, electronic structure, photophysics, chemical dynamics and molecular polaritonics. Her research career will help to promote teaching and research activity in emerging areas - for example, plasmonics, a discipline that links photonics and nanoelectronics - that are transforming knowledge in physical chemistry and materials engineering.
Clara Juárez, currently affiliated to the Department of Communication at the University of Vienna (Austria), specializes in the field of political psychology and communication and in areas related to populism and extremism. With the Beatriz Galindo Junior grant, Juárez joins the Department of Political Science, Constitutional Law and Philosophy of Law at the UB's Faculty of Law. Her most immediate objectives are to contribute to strengthening the department's lines of work from the perspective of political journalism, disinformation, conspiracy theories, populist communication and political mobilization in online communities, with a view to promoting the internationalization of research in political communication and exploring new avenues of comparative research.
Expert Albert Gandioso, currently a member of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Marburg (Germany), has developed his career as a researcher in different national and international institutions in the areas of bioorganic chemistry and chemical biology. Gandioso earned a PhD from the UB in 2018 with a thesis that presented new chemical tools for the fight against cancer, he is now the author of several articles in scientific journals of high international impact, and is co-author of a patent application related to the components of photosensitizers in photodynamic therapy. Albert Gandioso will be a Beatriz Galindo junior researcher in the Department of Inorganic and Organic Chemistry of the Faculty of Chemistry, and will join forces to promote interdisciplinarity and transversality in teaching and research in the most innovative areas of biological chemistry and inorganic chemistry.
