Manuel obtained his bachelor’s degree (2008), master’s degree (2009) and doctorate (2013) in Environmental Sciences from the Pablo de Olavide University (UPO). He completed several postdocs at Western Sydney University (WSU; Australia, 2014-2016), University of Colorado Boulder (USA, 2016-2018), Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (2014, 2018-2019) and University of Alicante (UA, 2019). He obtained a prestigious Ramón y Cajal contract and joined the UPO (2020-2021). In December 2021 he joined the Institute of Natural Resources and Agrobiology of Seville (IRNAS-CSIC) as a Scientific Researcher where he directs the BioFunLab and the UPO-CSIC BioFun R&D&I Unit. His research focuses on providing innovative knowledge about the soil biome in a context of global change.
Dr Morales holds a PhD in Industrial Engineering from the University of Castilla-La Mancha. After a first postdoctoral position as a Hans Christian Oersted Research Fellow, he went on to work as Senior Lecturer for the department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at the Technical University of Denmark, before returning to the University of Malaga in 2016, where he founded and currently heads the research group Optimisation and Analytics for Sustainable Energy Systems (OASYS). His research focuses on the development of algorithms, models and techniques based on mathematical optimisation, statistics and machine learning to allow the large-scale deployment of distributed renewable energy resources for power production systems.
Holder of a PhD in Chemistry from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, he is a professor at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA), team leader and deputy director at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, Barcelona, Honorary Professor at HIT in Harbin, China, and Associate Professor at POSTECH, South Korea. He previously worked at Max Planck and Leibniz in Germany and Japan. He has received many accolades for his pioneering work in nanorobotics, and has been awarded four European Research Council (ERC) grants, including the Consolidator Grant that he currently receives. He has published more than 150 articles, presented more than 130 conferences and holds 7 patents, one of them licensed to the spin-off of which he is a founder.
Tenured professor at the Carlos III University of Madrid and holder of a PhD in Psychoacoustics from the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, recognised for her research in the fields of engineering and applied acoustics. Her research focuses on the design of sensory technology to change people’s perception of their own bodies in real time, creating Body Transformation Experiences.
PhD in Astrophysics from the Tor Vergata University of Rome. Since 2016, she has been a CSIC scientist at the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE, CSIC-IEEC) in Barcelona. Her research focuses on theoretical observations and simulations of neutron stars –the compact and highly magnetic remnants of relatively massive star supernova explosions.
Dr. Rea has been recognised for her contribution to the field of astrophysics, focusing her research on the study of a class of neutron stars with extremely intense magnetic fields: magnetars, a particular type of pulsars.
Holder of a PhD in Mathematics from the Complutense University of Madrid and member of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (ICMAT). After a few years at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, following his PhD, where he started to work on quantum information theories, he went back to the Complutense University in 2006 to establish the “Mathematics and Quantum Information” research team, which currently has 14 researchers. In 2018, he was appointed Corresponding Academician of the Royal Academy of Sciences.
Prof. Martín has a Degree and PhD in Chemistry from the University of Barcelona. After five years working on his postdoctoral research in the field of organometallic catalysis, in 2008 he began his professional career at the Catalan Institute of Chemical Research (ICIQ, Tarragona). In 2013 he was promoted to Associate Professor and subsequently to ICREA Research Professor. He is currently leading a research team of 17 PhD students and postdoctoral researchers at ICIQ in Tarragona.
Doctor in Physics at the University of Dijon (France). Since 2002 he has worked at The Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona (ICFO for its acronym in Spanish) in the field of nanoplasmonics, and since 2008 he has worked as a professor at ICREA, and is also the leader of a tenured group at ICFO. His area of research is focused on the study of the optical properties of nanostructures, known as nanophotonics. He has won awards for his contributions in the field of nanophotonics, which includes the creation and development of ‘nano optical tweezers’ which can trap particles as small as molecules and viruses without modifying them, which offers a very wide range of uses in the field of biomedicine.