Award ceremony of the prizes conferred by the Board of Trustees and the Bosch i Gimpera Foundation

Marta Vila received the José Manuel Blecua Prize for the best article published in a prestigious journal in the field of humanities and social sciences. She is the co-author of an article focused on the linguistic phenomenon of paraphrase. Its main objective is to contribute to the development of an effective computational treatment of paraphrases. The study links linguistics and computing and applies them to a specific task: the automatic detection of plagiarism.

The second José Manuel Blecua Prize was given to Gonçalo Santos for his article “Numbers and everything”, published in the journal Philosophia Mathematica. It analyses a key aspect in philosophy: what does the expression “absolutely everything mean?”.

A study developed by Xavier Serra, researcher at the Institute of Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), received the Ramon Margalef Prize for the best article published in a prestigious journal in the field of experimental and health sciences. Serra's study analyses cell massive collective movements; they take place when an organism develops its shape or heals wounds, or when tumours metastasize.

The second Ramon Margalef Prize was conferred on a study developed by Ricardo Pérez de la Fuente, from the Biodiversity Research Institute of the UB. It focuses on a 110 million year fossil that represents a predatory larva. The insect was named mind-blowing Diogenes green lacewing (Hallucinochrysa diogenesi), alluding to its mind-blowing appearance and resemblance to Diogenes syndrome. This is the most ancient case of camouflage in insects.

The company SIRUSA and the UB research group Design and Optimization of Processes and Materials (DIOPMA) have developed a twenty-year collaboration which received the Antoni Caparrós Prize for the best project of knowledge transfer. It is an initiative with a clear environmental value: the waste and sub-products generated from the incineration of urban solid waste are reused as secondary materials for the construction sector.

The second Antoni Caparrós Prize was given to a training program on organ donation and transplantation led by Martí Manyalich, lecturer at the Faculty of Medicine of the UB, president of the DTI Foundation - Donation & Transplantation Institute (located at the Barcelona Science Park, PCB-UB) and transplantation consultant at the Hospital Clínic in Barcelona. The programme is based on the fact that providing healthcare professionals with appropriate educational programs on organ donation is essential to solve organ scarcity. Spain has become a model as it is the country with the highest rate of donations in the world.

The Senén Vilaró Prize for the best innovative company has been conferred on Endor Nanotechnologies, a technology-based company that focuses its activity on metallic nanoparticles (mainly gold, silver and platinum). It modifies them at the surface level with organic molecules in order to obtain advanced nanosystems with specific functions. The particular characteristics of metallic nanoparticles have allowed the company to study different aspects. On the one hand, it uses programmes of medical application focused on oncology and commercialises them through the pharmaceutical industry; on the other hand, it uses programmes to develop dermatological applications, for instance common and innovative cosmetic products.