The Premis Ciutat de Barcelona have awarded works on cancer, COVID-19 and climate
The winners are Santiago Giralt, Núria López-Bigas, Ferran Muiños, Abel González-Pérez and the BIOCOMSC research group of the UPC.
The Premis Ciutat de Barcelona 2021 winners in the scientific categories have been announced. The jury has awarded studies and papers related to climate and human migration, as well as cancer and COVID-19.
The prize in the category of Environmental and Earth Sciences went to Santiago Giralt, a researcher at the Geoscience Barcelona-CSIC, for his paper Climate change facilitated the early colonization of the Azores Archipelago during medieval times, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. The paper highlights the relevance of climate in human migrations and the impact of the anthropogenic footprint on the environment since ancient times. The jury wanted to emphasise the award winner's leadership and the work of the interdisciplinary teams at CREAF at the Universitat de Barcelona and the ICTA of the Universitat Autònima de Barcelona.
Núria López-Bigas, Ferran Muiños and Abel González-Pérez have been awarded the Premi Ciutat de Barcelona 2021 in Life Sciences for their paper In silico saturation mutagenesis of cancer genes, published in the journal Nature. The jury considered the work contributes to advancing the basic understanding of cancer by developing innovative and essential computational methods, which enables the chance to decipher mutational patterns in data obtained from patients in different tumour tissues. The verdict also mentions the importance of the study for the cross-cutting advancement of several basic research disciplines such as genomics, evolutionary biology and cell biology.
In Experimental Sciences and Technology, the prize went to the BIOCOMSC research group of the UPC, made up by researchers Clara Prats, Daniel López-Codina, Enric Álvarez Lacalle, Sergio Alonso and Martí Català. The jury has valued their contribution to the mathematical modelling of the epidemiological dynamics of COVID-19 – more specifically, their work in the dissemination and communication of science, which makes the daily monitoring of the short-term evolution of the epidemiological data accessible and comprehensible to society.
For more information on the Premis Ciutat de Barcelona, click here.