Professor Montserrat Aguadé receives the Gold Medal for scientific merit from Barcelona City Council
Emeritus professor of the University of Barcelona Montserrat Aguadé has received the Gold Medal for scientific merit from Barcelona City Council in recognition of her scientific career, academic dedication and social commitment. The award ceremony, which took place yesterday, 23 January, also honoured the anthropologist Teresa San Román and the cardiologist Valentí Fuster.
Emeritus professor of the University of Barcelona Montserrat Aguadé has received the Gold Medal for scientific merit from Barcelona City Council in recognition of her scientific career, academic dedication and social commitment. The award ceremony, which took place yesterday, 23 January, also honoured the anthropologist Teresa San Román and the cardiologist Valentí Fuster.
Montserrat Aguadé (Barcelona, 1949) graduated from the UB with a degree in Biological Sciences in 1971, and in 1974 she obtained her PhD under the supervision of the prestigious geneticist Antoni Prevosti. She began teaching at the UB in 1972 and became Professor of Genetics in 1988. She led the Molecular Evolutionary Genetics group in the Faculty of Biology and was a member of the Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio) at the UB. She was also a visiting professor at Harvard University, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) in North Carolina and the University of California at Davis (USA). During her stays, she collaborated with the teams of professors Lewontin and Langley, leaders in evolutionary and population genetics.
In fact, Aguadé's research stands out especially for her scientific contribution to evolutionary molecular genetics and population genetics. Many of her contributions are now mandatory references in textbooks in her speciality, and are fundamental for the understanding of evolutionary genetic change, and in particular for determining the impact of natural selection on DNA sequences.
Moreover, Aguadé is the author of numerous scientific articles in high-impact journals in experimental sciences, such as Nature, Proceedings of National Academy of Science (PNAS) and Genetics and Genome Research, among others. She has also been associate editor of the international journals Heredity and Genetics, and an advisory member of the editorial boards of the journals Genetics, Selection and Evolution and Molecular Biology and Evolution.
She chaired the Society of Molecular Biology and Evolution, the Spanish Society of Genetics and the specific commission of Life Sciences of the Catalan University Quality Assurance Agency, and she has also been a member of the evaluation panel of the European Research Council Starting Grants programme. She is currently a member of the Biological Sciences Section of the Institute for Catalan Studies.
Among other awards, Montserrat Aguadé has received the Distinction for the Promotion of University Research from the Catalan Government and, in 2010, the National Genetics Award.