Isabel Fariñas is Professor of Cell Biology at the Universitat de Valencia and coordinator of the Molecular Neurobiology Unit (NeuroMol). She completed her PhD at the Instituto Cajal and carried out postdoctoral research at University of California, San Francisco with Louis Reichardt, where she made key contributions to demonstrating the essential functions of neurotrophic factors using genetically modified mouse models, publishing in leading journals. Since establishing her independent research career in Spain, her work has focused on the biology of the neural stem cell niche. She helped define the role of blood vessels in neurogenic niches, the active regulation of stem cell quiescence, and the influence of cell-cycle molecules, cell adhesion, and inflammation in maintaining these cells. She has led more than 30 competitive research projects—including an ERC Advanced Grant—and published over 100 articles in journals such as Nature, Cell, Neuron, and Cell Stem Cell. With an h-index of 51 and more than 15,000 citations, she ranks among the top 2% most cited scientists worldwide.
She is a member of EMBO and the recipient of the 2024 Santiago Ramón y Cajal National Research Award in Biology, and has held numerous leadership positions, including President of the Biosciences and Biotechnology panel at Spain’s State Research Agency. She serves on multiple national and international scientific committees and is active in technology transfer and science outreach. Her teaching record is equally distinguished: more than 25 years teaching cell biology and neuroscience, a key role in developing degree programs at her university, supervision of 18 doctoral theses, and the training of nearly 40 researchers.
It is overwhelming—although I must say that many people deserve this award. So I consider myself fortunate. I repeat: there are countless researchers in this country who are equally deserving. Spain is deeply committed to science, and often—despite limited resources—near miracles are achieved. I have enormous respect for the research community. That is why receiving this award is both overwhelming and an immense honor.
What does frustration mean? That’s what I ask young researchers. In a mentoring session, a student once asked me how to deal with failure, and I replied: “Define failure.” If you set very specific expectations and things do not turn out as planned, you tend to see that as failure. But in our profession, we must view such situations as opportunities. We have to be prepared for things not to work out, because the problems we tackle are complex and difficult.
I often tell my students that we train them as if they were going to solve the great problems of science. But that is not entirely true, because real problems require immense creativity, and you are never fully prepared for them. Life is complex. That is why you must let go of expectations and approach questions by “embracing your stupidity,” as a colleague once wrote in an editorial in Nature. Only when you say, “This is beyond me; I have no expectations,” do you begin to think without limits. Then you enjoy the process, you become creative, and when you solve the problem, it is wonderful.
In this profession, there is no fixed pathRam, so there is no single predefined destination. After so many years, I believe the most important thing is to enjoy the journey, not the goal. I wake up happy each day because of what I do. That is what I tell my students: in life, the aim is to be happy. You have to know what lies within you, understand what you would like to do every day, and seek out what makes you happy.
I think I always felt that way, even if I had not put it into words. When I read that editorial in Nature, I thought: “Of course—that is exactly what happens to me.” The researcher described how he realized it the day he went to the world’s leading expert on a topic, explained his problem, and the expert replied: “I have no idea how to solve it.” That was the turning point. If you enjoy the process—even when things do not work out—you find gratification.
Research is not just technical. There is a great deal of technique, yes, but I am absolutely convinced that it is an almost artistic profession. Often you read a colleague’s paper and think: “How beautifully they solved that!” It is marvelous. That is why it is not a 9-to-5 job.
Yes, because society has changed and different values are now emphasized. I love working with young people—they have extraordinary talents. It is not better or worse; it is different. They hold strong values and know how to assert themselves. At the same time, regulations shape how research centers are structured. Now, for example, time tracking is sometimes required because of European Union regulations, which can convey the idea that research is a clock-in, clock-out job. In the past, research was experienced in a more “liberal” way. Both young researchers and institutional structures have changed.
Yes. The European Union has provided many guidelines and frameworks, and that influences how individuals perceive their work. Even so, young researchers have much to contribute and are very well trained. We may have been more obsessive, but I am very satisfied with my career. Each generation operates within its own context; today’s young scientists live in a different one, and their decisions make sense within the society they inhabit.
There is a concept I like very much: reverse mentoring. Senior scientists mentor younger ones, but younger researchers also mentor their seniors. That is how progress happens—by learning from one another. That point of encounter is where we move forward most effectively.
Yes—but the concept prompts you to ask yourself how much you truly listen. It is a reminder, like the idea of “embracing stupidity.” It encourages reflection on how you act.
I wanted to be a researcher from the age of thirteen. My parents did not have formal education, but they wanted us to study. I am the eldest, and it was not clear whether I would be able to attend university because we had family difficulties, so I began looking for work. A classmate told me that I would not have to pay tuition because I had graduated with honors in my final year of secondary school. That allowed me to study Biology.
In my second year at university, I discovered Santiago Ramón y Cajal. I read his books—very accessible—and was captivated.
Enormously. Yet he was a visionary. With a microscope that we would not even use for teaching today, he interpreted astonishing things. Everything he wrote has proven correct. He understood the nervous system during development, when it displays its full dynamism—that insight was crucial. Today, thanks to modern technology, we demonstrate what he had already intuited.
We know some associated genes, but we do not know why these diseases emerge. By the time they become clinically apparent, many neurons have already been lost. The brain compensates, and when it can no longer do so, the disease has been present for years. Assuming that these conditions affect only older people is a mistake. That is why there is so much effort devoted to early diagnosis: blood biomarkers, more precise imaging techniques, prodromal syndromes. I believe we are approaching a paradigm shift.
There is tremendous diversity. A study in Ireland was able to relate childhood cognitive performance—examination records from compulsory schooling had been preserved in residential institutions—to brain aging decades later. It is not a simple cause-and-effect relationship, because many factors are involved, but childhood performance explained a significant portion of the variability. Who we are in childhood and how we care for the brain matter greatly.
We have advanced enormously, but the brain is the most complex structure that exists. Every brain is unique. We are born with all our neurons, and from that moment neural plasticity reshapes connections throughout life. That is why stereotypes make little sense: each person is unique. And that complexity makes the brain extraordinarily difficult to understand. We cannot assign a thought or action to a single specific circuit. That is the great challenge.
On 19 February 2026, the Centre de Recerca Matemàtica inaugurated its first CRM Faculty Colloquium, a new quarterly event designed to bring together the mathematical community around the research carried out by scientists affiliated with the Centre. The CRM auditorium filled up for this first edition, marked by the prestige and international recognition of its three speakers: Xavier Tolsa, Joaquim Ortega-Cerdà, and Xavier Cabré, all invited participants at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM 2026) in Philadelphia. Their joint presence in the same ICM — an unprecedented occurrence — served as a unifying thread of the colloquium, a shared source of pride, and an element that added special symbolic significance to the event.
As highlighted by the CRM Director during the welcome remarks, the new colloquium aims to foster synergies between research groups, showcase recent advances, and strengthen internal scientific cohesion. In this context, the first talk was delivered by Xavier Tolsa (ICREA – UAB – CRM), titled Quantitative rectifiability, singular integrals, and harmonic measure. Tolsa, who will be a plenary speaker at this year’s ICM, introduced the foundations of quantitative rectifiability, a research area that links the fine geometry of sets with tools from harmonic analysis, such as square functions and singular integrals. Throughout his lecture, he revisited classical results while highlighting recent developments that have resolved deep problems related to harmonic measure, including the one-phase and two-phase cases, as well as new findings about its dimension. His talk allowed the audience to explore a highly active research field with connections ranging from analysis to potential theory and partial differential equations.
The second lecture, Serendipity strikes again, was delivered by Joaquim Ortega-Cerdà (UB – CRM), who has been invited to the Analysis section of the ICM. Ortega-Cerdà guided the audience through a fascinating journey connecting a classical problem from the Bell Labs in the 1960s with a recent result in Fourier analysis. The “fortunate accident” that enabled Landau, Slepian, and Pollack to advance signal theory reappears in a different context: the characterization of an extremal function that maximizes its value at 0 among bandlimited functions with 
norm equal to 1. In a joint work with Bondarenko, Radchenko, and Seip, the team achieves a complete identification of this function, after decades in which only numerical approximations were available. The key once again lies in an unexpected commutation of operators, an episode of mathematical serendipity that gives meaning to the title of the talk and captivated the audience.
The session concluded with a lecture by Xavier Cabré (ICREA – UPC – CRM), invited to the Partial Differential Equations section of the ICM, titled Elliptic PDEs: recent extensions on Hilbert’s 19th problem. Cabré offered a historical and modern overview beginning with Hilbert’s 1900 question on the regularity of minimizers of variational integrals, followed by the foundational contributions of De Giorgi and Nash in the 1950s, and leading to Simons’ work on minimal surfaces in 1968. From there, Cabré focused on recent progress on the regularity of stable solutions, a much broader class than absolute minimizers. He presented results obtained in the past decade, including joint work with Figalli, Ros-Oton, and Serra, as well as contributions from other researchers on stable minimal surfaces. He also highlighted several important open problems, such as regularity in 
and the fractional case, which remain major challenges in the field.
With this inaugural edition, the CRM Faculty Colloquium establishes itself as a valuable opportunity to share high-level research, strengthen connections, and showcase the work of the mathematical community linked to the Centre. The quality of the talks and the discussions that followed bode well for the future of this initiative, which will continue to gather researchers every quarter.
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CRM CommNatalia Vallina
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On 19 February 2026, the Centre de Recerca Matemàtica inaugurated its first CRM Faculty Colloquium, a new quarterly event designed to bring together the mathematical community around the research carried out by scientists affiliated with the Centre. The CRM auditorium…
When COVID-19 lockdowns disrupted healthcare in 2020, insurance companies discarded their data; claims had dropped 15%, and patterns made no sense. A new paper in Insurance: Mathematics and Economics shows how to rescue that information by…
L’exposició “Figures Visibles”, produïda pel CRM, s’ha inaugurat avui al vestíbul de la Facultat de Matemàtiques i Estadística (FME) de la UPC coincidint amb el Dia Internacional de la Nena i la Dona en la Ciència. La mostra recull la trajectòria…
L’investigador Xavier Tolsa (ICREA–UAB–CRM) ha estat guardonat amb el Premi Ciutat de Barcelona 2025 en la categoria de Ciències Fonamentals i Matemàtiques, un reconeixement que atorga l’Ajuntament de Barcelona i que enguany arriba a la seva 76a edició. L’acte de…
Axel Masó returns to CRM as a postdoctoral researcher after a two-year stint at the Knowledge Transfer Unit. He joins the Mathematical Biology research group and KTU to work on the Neuromunt project, an interdisciplinary initiative that studies…
The 4th Barcelona Weekend on Operator Algebras, held at the CRM on January 30–31, 2026, brought together experts to discuss recent advances and open problems in the field.The event strengthened the exchange of ideas within the community and reinforced the CRM’s role…
Ander Movilla has joined CRM as a Beatriu de Pinós postdoctoral fellow. Working with Tomás Alarcón, Movilla will develop mathematical models that capture not just the static architecture of DNA but its dynamic behaviour; how chromosome contacts shift as chemical marks…
A continuació podeu consultar la publicació dels criteris de priorització de les sol·licituds dels ajuts Joan Oró per a la contractació de personal investigador predoctoral en formació (FI 2026), dirigits a les universitats públiques i privades del…
Over 100 researchers gathered at the Centre de Recerca Matemàtica to explore the mathematical foundations needed to understand modern artificial intelligence. The three-day workshop brought together mathematicians working on PDEs, probability, dynamical systems, and…
From 19 to 23 January 2026, the CRM hosted the 8th International Conference on the Anthropological Theory of the Didactic (CITAD 8), a leading international event in the field of didactics research that brought together researchers from different countries in…
From October to November 2025, María Ángeles García Ferrero held the CRM Chair of Excellence, collaborating with Joaquim Ortega-Cerdà on concentration inequalities and teaching a BGSMath course on the topic. Her main research focuses on the Calderón problem,…
The post Three ICM speakers headline the first CRM Faculty Colloquium first appeared on Centre de Recerca Matemàtica.
Abstract: Arch behaviour of charge radii of Ca isotopes has been a long standing problem in nuclear theory [1–6]. Recently, it was proposed that the Fayans pairing is a possible solution to obtain it using nuclear density functional theory [2, 7]. In this talk, we will explain the mechanism why the Fayans pairing can show the arch behaviour [8].
References:
[1] F. Barranco and R. A. Broglia, Phys. Lett. B 151, 90 (1985).
[2] P.-G. Reinhard and W. Nazarewicz, Phys. Rev. C 95, 064328 (2017).
[3] U. C. Perera, A. V. Afanasjev, and P. Ring, Phys. Rev. C 104, 064313 (2021).
[4] G. Co’, M. Anguiano, and A. M. Lallena, Phys. Rev. C 105, 034320 (2022).
[5] B. A. Brown and K. Minamisono, Phys. Rev. C 106, L011304 (2022).
[6] T. Naito, T. Oishi, H. Sagawa, and Z. Wang, Phys. Rev. C 107, 054307 (2023).
[7] T. Inakura, N. Hinohara, and H. Nakada, Phys. Rev. C 110, 054315 (2024).
[8] T. Naito, G. Colò, X. Roca-Maza, H. Sagawa, and E. Vigezzi, To be submitted.
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Abstract: We construct relativistic point-particle actions in 2+1 dimensions using the non-linear realisation (coset) approach for the Mielke–Baekler (MB) algebra. In the torsional branch (p=0) the same background admits two equivalent Cartan descriptions: a teleparallel formulation with a flat (curvature-free) Weitzenböck connection and constant torsion, and a torsionless formulation in which the induced metric is locally AdS3. We show explicitly how the worldline equations can be written either as parallel transport with respect to the torsionful teleparallel connection or, in the torsionless split, as geodesic motion supplemented by the standard spin–curvature coupling in the spinning case, Papapetrou like equation. Finally, we take the Carroll contraction of the MB particle and obtain the corresponding torsional Carroll dynamics.
A large number of women scientists from ICN2 and other BIST centres joined the programme to promote female role models and help challenge gender stereotypes in schools across Catalonia.
Professor Katherine Villa Gómez, ICREA researcher and group leader at the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ), has been awarded the 2025 National Research Award for Young Talent. This prestigious award, granted by the Government of Catalonia and the Catalan Foundation for Research and Innovation (FCRI), recognises the scientific excellence and career of young researchers who have made a significant contribution to the advancement of science.
The professor expressed her deep gratitude for the recognition received: “I want to express my gratitude to the minister and the Foundation for this award. Catalonia is my second home, and receiving this recognition here is especially exciting for me.” He also highlighted that his scientific career – focused on physical chemistry, nanomaterials and energy – has been able to grow and consolidate thanks to the country’s research ecosystem.
He also underlined the relevance of his line of research, based on photocatalytic materials and photoactive micromotors: “We are working to develop light-driven micromotors that are capable of cleaning, detecting and transforming pollutants in a sustainable way. Our goal is for these advances to come out of the laboratory and become real solutions to face environmental and energy challenges.” He also called for support for emerging talent: “Betting on young researchers is betting on the future of the scientific system”, he said.
In this edition, the prize has been awarded ex aequo to Prof. Villa together with the researcher Nadejda Blagorodnova Mujortova, from the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB). The National Research Awards promote the social recognition of science and activity in research, patronage, entrepreneurship and communication, as well as the work of entities that promote knowledge transfer and the creation of science-based companies.
Research in sustainability
Katherine Villa’s career stands out for her leadership in the research of nanostructured photocatalytic systems based on multicomponent heterojunctions designed to convert pollutants into valuable chemicals and fuels. Her group also develops light-driven micro- and nanorobots that display autonomous motion, environmental sensing, and tuneable chemical activity, enabling applications in water purification, selective chemical transformations, and photodynamic therapy. Altogether, her research advances EU priorities in clean energy, water decontamination, and health.
In 2025, its work has been reinforced with the prestigious ERC Proof of Concept Grant for its PhotoSERS project. The project aims to develop light-powered microswimmers capable of selectively capturing and detecting harmful PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals”, from water, offering a sensitive, real-time monitoring solution for these persistent environmental pollutants.
Katherine Villa obtained her PhD in Chemistry from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and has developed a multidisciplinary career in top-level research centers across Europe. With over a decade of experience in photocatalysis, she has received several distinctions, such as an ERC Starting Grant, a Consolidación Investigadora Grant, a BBVA Foundation Leonardo Grant, the RSEQ Young Investigator Grant and the EuChemS Lecture Awards, among others.
La entrada Prof. Katherine Villa awarded the National Research Award for Young Talent 2025 se publicó primero en ICIQ.
