Dr. Karen de la Vega Hernández, postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ), has won first place at the Falling Walls Lab Global Finale 2025, held in Berlin. This victory has earned her the title of Science Breakthrough of the Year – Emerging Talents, one of the most prestigious recognitions for young innovators worldwide. Dr. de la Vega Hernández has been distinguished as the leading young talent among more than 100 finalists worldwide.
Her pitch, titled “Breaking the Wall of Molecular Monotony,” uses the analogy of pizza-making to explain a key challenge in drug design: the difficulty of generating diverse versions of existing medicines to improve their properties.
“We build the tools that allow scientists to create as many versions of a medicine as needed — faster, cheaper, and more sustainably,” explains Karen. “Just as you might change pizza toppings to suit different tastes, our approach lets us fine-tune molecules to meet current needs.”
Through her postdoctoral work in the group of ICIQ Group Leader Prof. Marcos García Suero, Karen and her colleagues have developed two innovative molecular editing tools that allow researchers to modify drug molecules efficiently, enabling the rapid exploration of new analogues with improved efficacy or safety. Their discoveries, published in two articles in the Journal of Amercian Chemical Society (JACS) in 2025, open new pathways for next-generation drug design.
“Karen’s success shows how scientific excellence, and creativity can go hand in hand,” said Prof. Marcos García Suero. “This work exemplifies how chemistry can truly transform the way we design medicines.”
This achievement reflects ICIQ’s commitment to supporting early-career researchers and contributing to meaningful scientific progress.
Karen, a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at ICIQ, has built an impressive international research profile in organometallic, radical, and supramolecular chemistry. She represented the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) community after winning the Falling Walls Lab MSCA event in Denmark, where 17 finalists competed during the MSCA Presidency Conference 2025. From over a hundred applications, she was selected among the top three winners to advance to the global stage — and has now achieved the top global prize, standing out among a hundred finalists from 82 international labs across 60 countries. For the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, this recognition is especially significant, as it marks the first time a Marie Curie fellow has won the global Falling Walls Lab competition, highlighting the excellence and international impact of the MSCA community.
The Falling Walls Lab competition brings together emerging scientists and entrepreneurs from around the world to present their breakthrough ideas in just three minutes under the motto “Which are the next walls to fall?” The three top global winners are awarded the Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year 2025 title in the Emerging Talents category, recognizing ideas with exceptional creativity, scientific rigor, and global impact. Falling Walls Lab is part of the prestigious Falling Walls Science Summit, which gathers leading scientists, innovators, and Nobel laureates every year in Berlin. Winning the global finale is an outstanding recognition of emerging scientific talent and creative science communication.
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