This Thursday at the Teatro Real in Madrid, the L’Oréal Unesco Prizes for Women in Science were presented to Spanish scientists Patricia González-Rodríguez, Amaia Arruabarrena-Aristorena, Cristina Vieitez, Noelia Ferruz and Nuria Galiana. The 17th edition of the awards in Spain was to recognize their work on projects ranging from finding new therapies for Parkinson’s, to protein research to advancing the treatment of cancer and other diseases, to achieving greater protection effectiveness range from ecosystems. The aim of the program is to make women in science visible and to promote the scientific vocation of the youngest.
Patricia González-Rodríguez is a junior principal researcher at the University of Seville and at the Institute of Biomedicine of the same city. The neuroscientist works to better understand Parkinson’s disease and to contribute to the development of new therapies that improve the quality of life and life expectancy of patients. “The current challenge is to find methods to diagnose the disease at an early stage, before the damage is irreversible,” he says.
Amaia Arruabarrena-Aristorena’s research examines epigenetic regulators: “These are proteins that remodel the state of our genetic material, our DNA and gene expression,” explains the researcher from the University of the Basque Country. It is based on the hypothesis that a series of changes in several of these regulators could influence the development and aggressiveness of breast cancer. “We are laying the necessary foundations so that clinical studies can be carried out that result in therapy alternatives for the clinic,” he says.
More information:
Moving on to proteins: Cristina Vieitez, biomedical scientist at the Institute of Functional Biology and Genomics, focuses her project on learning about histones. “It’s proteins that package the DNA in the nucleus of our cells,” he explains. In order for these to function properly, the histones must undergo a series of changes. These modifications form circuits as if they were “molecular switches”. When the circuits go wrong, diseases like cancer develop. Vieitez’s goal is to understand how these variations are regulated in order to “define new therapeutic targets for the treatment of human diseases.”
Noelia Ferruz also researches proteins at the Institute of Molecular Biology in Barcelona. The researcher trained an artificial intelligence model that can “make a lot of proteins in a matter of seconds.” This allows the generation of new proteins that could be used to treat diseases or reduce the effects of climate change, he defends.
Ecologist Nuria Galiana is doing research at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid with a Marie Curie grant from the European Union. The main goal of his research is to understand how ecosystems are changing and how they are affected by climate change in order to design more effective conservation strategies.
At the awards ceremony, the five award winners spoke about the difficulties women in science face with being mothers and reconciling, as well as the low representation of women in leadership positions. Vieitiez assured that many young women still have the idea that they have to choose between their scientific career and starting a family. “Many young women abandon their studies because they see that reconciliation is not possible,” added Arruabarrena-Aristorena. “Without science there is no future, but also without women,” said González-Rodríguez.
The jury that selected the five winners is made up of four experts in the fields of life sciences and the environment: Ángela Nieto, group leader of the Institute of Neuroscience 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 Fellow 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 program “For Women in Science” was launched in 1998 and since then has supported more than 3,900 researchers from more than 110 countries. In 2006, the Spanish edition of the research awards was launched, aimed at scientists under 40 years of age, with prize money of 15,000 euros each for the winning projects.
you can follow THEME on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, or sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.*