This Thursday the L’Oréal-Unesco For Women in Science awards were presented at the Teatro Real in Madrid to the Spanish scientists Patricia González-Rodríguez, Amaia Arruabarrena-Aristorena, Cristina Vieitez, Noelia Ferruz and Nuria Galiana. The 17th edition of the awards in Spain wanted to recognize their work in projects ranging from the search for new therapies for Parkinson’s, going through protein research to advance the treatment of cancer and other diseases, to how to achieve more conservation ecosystem effectiveness. The objective of the program is to give visibility to women in science and promote the scientific vocation of the youngest.
Patricia González-Rodríguez is a junior principal investigator at the University of Seville and the Institute of Biomedicine in the same city. The neuroscientist works to better understand Parkinson’s disease and contribute to the development of new therapies that improve the quality and life expectancy of patients. “The current challenge is to find methods to diagnose the disease in its early stages, before the damage is irreversible,” she says.
Amaia Arruabarrena-Aristorena’s research studies epigenetic regulators: “They are proteins that remodel the state of our genetic material, DNA and gene expression,” explains the researcher from the University of the Basque Country. It is based on the hypothesis that a series of alterations in several of these regulators could influence the development and aggressiveness of breast cancer. “We lay the necessary foundations so that clinical studies can be carried out that give rise to therapeutic alternatives for the clinic,” she says.
Continuing with proteins, Cristina Vieitez, biomedical at the Institute of Functional Biology and Genomics, focuses her project on learning about histones. “They are proteins that package the DNA in the nucleus of our cells,” she expands. For these to work properly, the histones have to undergo a series of changes. These modifications form circuits as if they were “molecular switches.” If the circuits go wrong, diseases such as cancer will appear. Vieitez’s goal is to understand how these variations are regulated to “define new therapeutic targets for the treatment of human diseases.”
Noelia Ferruz also studies proteins at the Barcelona Institute of Molecular Biology. The researcher herself trained an artificial intelligence model that can “generate many proteins in seconds.” This makes it possible to generate new proteins that could be used to treat diseases or reduce the effects of climate change, she defends.
The ecologist Nuria Galiana researches at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid with a Marie Curie grant from the European Union. The main goal of her research is to understand how ecosystems change and how climate change affects them in order to develop more effective conservation strategies.
During the awards ceremony, the five winners have spoken about the difficulties that women in science have when it comes to being mothers and being able to reconcile, and the low representation of women in positions of responsibility. Vieitiez has assured that many young women still have the conception that they have to choose between their scientific career and starting a family. “Many young women leave their studies because they see that reconciliation is not possible”, added Arruabarrena-Aristorena. “Without science there is no future, but without women either”, González-Rodríguez has sentenced.
The jury that has chosen the five winners is made up of four experts in Life Sciences and the Environment: Ángela Nieto, Group Leader of the Institute of Neurosciences CSIC-UMH and Laureate for Europe in 2022 in the international version of the awards; María A. Blasco Marhuenda, director of the CNIO National Cancer Research Center; María Vallet-Regí, Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the UCM Faculty of Pharmacy and Full Member of the Royal Academies of Engineering and Pharmacy; and Rafael Garesse Alarcón, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Autonomous University of Madrid.
The L’Oréal-Unesco For Women in Science program was born in 1998, since then it has supported more than 3,900 researchers from more than 110 countries. In 2006, the Spanish edition of the Research Awards was created, which are aimed at scientists under 40 years of age and have a financial endowment of 15,000 euros for each of the winning projects.
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