L’Oréal UNESCO Award For Women in Science

We are thrilled to announce that Nuria Galiana won one of the 2023 L’Oréal UNESCO Awards For Women in Science.

Nuria, 34 years, has been recognized for her research on the global projection of ecological networks in a changing climate. Her research aims to obtain a holistic understanding of the impacts of climate change on ecosystems. The interactions between species and the structure of the ecological networks they form are key to understanding the organization of biodiversity in the world.

Her project’s objective in our Lab is to generate knowledge to design informed conservation strategies, while seeking to understand how ecosystems are changing and how they are affected by climate change in order to design more effective conservation strategies.

“I began my research career in the field of community ecology, with a desire to create knowledge that helps us understand our ecosystems and, therefore, conserve and protect them. Over time, I developed a taste for the abstract and more theoretical questions. In the field I currently work in, I found a balance between these aspects,” she explains.

The research was chosen by a prestigious jury composed of eminent scientific experts in the areas covered in this edition. With regards to women in science, Nuria highlights the various factors that make it difficult for women to pursue scientific careers, such as the pause that having children can have on scientific development and the added pressure women commonly face due to insecurities associated with their abilities.

Nuria’s academic journey has earned her the prestigious Marie Curie fellowship from the European Union. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Science from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and also completed a Master’s degree in Terrestrial Ecology and Biodiversity Management at the same university. In 2015, she moved to France to pursue her doctoral thesis at the Theoretical and Experimental Ecology Station at Toulouse III-Paul Sabatier University (CNRS), where she focused on integrating ecological networks with spatial processes and the geographic distribution of animals and plants. She subsequently obtained her first post-doctoral contract, where she further deepened her theoretical knowledge on the dynamics of ecological communities.

In 2020, she returned to Spain for her second post-doctoral job, modeling natural ecosystems. Currently, Nuria studies the influence of biotic interactions between species on the spatial distribution of species in the world at the Miguel Bastos Araújo’s Lab in the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid after obtaining the prestigious Marie Curie fellowship from the European Union.

Pioneering in the field of biogeographic networks, her main achievements in research have helped demonstrate, both theoretically and experimentally, the change in the structure of ecological networks across spatial scales. Likewise, her studies have shown the influence of species interactions on processes at biogeographic scales.