The ICREA program was created by the Catalan Institution for Research Advanced Studies (ICREA) to encourage university professionals with an outstanding research career to stay in the Catalan university system. In the 2011 edition, the awardees from the University of Barcelona are the following:
Dr. Montserrat Guillén, professor at the Department of Econometrics, Statistics and Spanish Economy and director of the consolidated research group on Risk in Insurance and Finance (Riskcenter, IREA-UB). Montserrat Guillén holds a Bachelorʼs degree and a PhD from the UB, as well as an MA from the University of Essex (UK). She was visiting professor at the University of Texas, in Austin (USA) and she holds a visiting professor position at the University of Paris II (France). She has published many scientific papers and she is associate editor of the Journal of Risk and Insurance, senior editor of the ASTIN Bulletin (International Actuarial Association), and chief editor of SORT. Statistics and Operations Research Transactions. In 2003 she was awarded by the Casualty Actuarial Society (USA) and in 2011 she was elected president of the European Group of Risk and Insurance Economists (EGRIE).
Her research is on insurance, risk management and actuarial statistics. She works on semi-nonparametric models and dynamic pricing of insurance products. She is studying long-term care protection, retirement plans with alternative pension-saving strategies and the implications of international regulations on insurance and finance.
Dr. Joan López-Moliner, BA in Psychology from the UB and PhD in Computer Science from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC). After a post-doc position at the Department of Neuroscience at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, López-Moliner became associate professor at the Department of Basic Psychology of the University of Barcelona. He is also member of the research group on Brain, Cognition and Behaviour (IR3C) and he currently leads a sensorio-motor integration research group and collaborates with several renowned European research groups in the field of vision and motor control.
His research is devoted to temporal mechanisms of human performance in dynamic environments. In particular, he is interested in finding out the limits of human performance in scenarios in which the spatiotemporal aspects are continuously changing, because new information stimulates our senses at high rates, increasing the level of uncertainty in decision-making and interactive actions.
Dr. Modesto Orozco, professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Barcelona, and director of the Molecular Modelling and Bioinformatics Group at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona). Professor Orozco is also director of the joint research program in Computational Biology (IRB Barcelona and BSC) and of the Structural Bioinformatics node of the National Institute of Bioinformatics (INB). He also leads the Life Sciences Department of the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC). Dr. Orozco is one of the leading European researchers on the simulation of biological systems and an international expert on the theoretical study of macromolecular systems, especially nucleic acids (DNA and RNA).
Throughout his career, he has published more than 300 scientific articles and has developed a series of computational programs and algorithms that the entire international scientific community still benefits from today. His articles have nearly 9,000 citations and a very high impact index, as shown by his Hirsch index of 51, thus making him one of the most renowned computational chemists and biologists in the world. Dr. Orozco is an editor and a member of the editorial boards of the most prestigious international scientific journals in his field of knowledge. He is also a member of assessment panels in Spain, Europe and the United States, and is a consultant for different pharmaceutical companies. Dr. Orozco has received a number of national and international awards for his work and has received financing from the Marcelino Botín Foundation for the last four years.
Dr. Lothar Schulte, professor at the Department of Physical Geography and Regional Geographical Analysis. He studied Geography, Geology and Economic History at the Heinrich-Heine-University, in Düsseldorf, and at the University of Cologne, and he obtained his PhD at the University of Barcelona. His work on Quaternary catchment response in semi-arid environments was awarded by the Spanish Quaternary Research Association. From 2001 to 2002 he was postdoc at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and invited professor at the University of Berne. He performed research stays at the University of California-Berkeley, Marburg, Bernardo OʼHiggins (Chile) and at the Centre for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM, Bremen). Since 2006 he is professor of Physical Geography and PI of the international FluVAlps Research Group (Fluvial Variability, Climate and Land Use Interactions in Alpine Environments). In addition, he became member of the Spanish INQUA Committee and the DFG Assessment Committee of the Collaborative Research Centre 806.
His research is devoted to alpine flood dynamics over pluri-millennium time scales and focus on the impact of global change on high mountain environments and local communities. High resolution paleoflood reference records are performed in order to identify the sensitivity and resilience of fluvial processes to external and internal driving forces and to understand the pattern of climate risk.
