Lecturer Ruben Cereijo is honoured by the Catalan Society for Biology in the categories of young researcher and scientific article

Participants in the award ceremony were Joan Gómez, director-general of Research in the Catalan Government; Joandomènec Ros, president of the Institute for Catalan Studies (IEC) and emeritus lecturer of the UB; Montserrat Corominas, president of the Catalan Society for Biology (SCB) and professor at the Department of Genetics, Microbiology and Genetic Statistics of the UB, and Gemma Marfany, lecturer in the mentioned Department of the UB.

Ruben Cereijo is member of the research group on Molecular Metabolism and Associated Pathologies of the UB, led by Professor Francesc Villarroya, and member of the Institute of Biomedicine of the University of Barcelona (IBUB) and the Physiopathology of Obesity and Nutrition Networking Biomedical Research Centre (CIBERobn). In particular, the SCB Young Researcher Award is for his doctoral thesis Nous actors moleculars en la fisiologia del teixit adipós i pathologies associades, read in the University of Barcelona in 2015 and supervised by Francesc Villarroya and Marta Giralt, members from the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biomedicine of the Faculty of Biology of the UB, IBUB and CIBERobn.

In this edition, the Catalan Society for Biology has also awarded Ruben Cereijo the SCB Scientific Article Award as first author of the article “CXCL14, a brown adipokine that mediates brown-fat-to-macrophage communication in thermogenic adaptation”, published in the prestigious science journal Cell Metabolism in 2018. According to this study, the CXCL14 protein -related to tumor progression and organogenesis- is synthetized by the brown adipose tissue and can activate cells with anti-inflammatory activity -M2 macrophages-, which have a beneficial effect on the organism.

This year, the Catalan Society for Biology awarded the student Catherine Iglesias, from Institut Ramon Turró i Darder, Malgrat de Mar, who won the SCB Treball de Recerca de Batxillerat (upper secondary school research project) Award for the project Bacteris com a agents descontaminants de vessaments dʼhidrocarburs en un mèdi aquatic. Antoni Pou, journalist and science communicator, received the SCB Divulgació Award for the media portfolio on evolution, published in the newspaper Ara. Last, the researcher Anna Veiga, director of the Bank of Cell Lines of the Regenerative Medicine Center of Barcelona, director of R&D Services of Reproductive Medicine in the University Institute Dexeus and lecturer at the Pompeu Fabra University, was awarded the SCB Professional Career Leandre Cervera Award.