Carmen Garcia Coma, Pedro Cermino, Marta Villegas and Elvan Bok, Ciutat de Barcelona Awards 2022

BARCELONA, January 29 (European Press) –

The Barcelona City Council honored Carmen García-Comas, Pedro Cermino, Marta Villegas and Elvan Bock with the Ciutat de Barcelona Prizes for Earth and Environmental Sciences, Experimental Sciences and Technology and Life Sciences, respectively.

The Barcelona Institute of Culture (Icub) reported in a statement on Sunday that the prizes have an endowment of €9,500 and will be handed out on February 15 at a ceremony to be held in the Salou de Cent of the Barcelona City Council.

In the Earth and Environmental Sciences category, the jury recognized researchers Carmen García-Comas and Pedro Cermino for their work “Post-Extinction Recovery in Paleozoic Oceans and Biodiversity Hotspots,” a “paradigm shift” in knowledge of the evolution and recovery of marine biodiversity after the extinction of the past 500 million years.

In Experimental Science and Technology, the jury awarded researcher Marta Villegas for building and developing natural language processing models Aina and Marla, a “critical step in preserving the linguistic heritage” of Catalan and Spanish on the World Wide Web.

As for life sciences, the jury recognized Dr. Elvan Bok for her work “Oocytes maintain ROS-free mitochondrial metabolism by suppressing cGMP,” for her contribution to knowledge of cell biology and female fertility, and for her consideration of original and strong research that “opens new research avenues in different fields” .