Paula Bustos is ICREA Research Professor at IPEG, Research Fellow at the European Economic Association and the CEPR and Co-editor at the Journal of International Economics. She obtained her PhD in Economics at Harvard University and her Bachelor Degree at Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Argentina. Her first line of research investigated the effects of trade liberalization on technology adoption and the skill composition of exporting firms. A second research line studies the effects of new agricultural technologies, such as GM crops, on structural transformation. More recently, she is investigating the effects of climate change on labor and capital flows in developing countries. Her research has been funded by a Starting Grant from the European Research Council in 2017.

María’s research combines electrochemistry, materials science and in situ characterisation to elucidate design principles for the discovery and development of novel electrocatalysts for renewable energy conversion and storage. Her work involves engineering the structure of the catalytically active sites at the atomic level, developing advanced nanomaterials, and gaining a mechanistic understanding of relevant reactions for the production of sustainable fuels and chemicals. She has received numerous awards at international and national levels in recognition of her groundbreaking research. In 2022, she has been awarded a ERC Consolidator Grant (2023-2028) for her project ‘ATOMISTIC’ to investigate atomic-scale tailored materials for electrochemical methane activation and conversion into valuable liquid fuels such as methanol.

Rachel’s research involves modelling the impact of environmental change on infectious disease epidemics, to inform disease control and prevention strategies. She has published high impact research on modelling climate-sensitive disease risk, with a focus on integrating seasonal climate forecasts in dengue early warning systems in the Americas and Southeast Asia. She is the Executive Director of the Lancet Countdown in Europe, a transdisciplinary collaboration tracking progress on health and climate change. In 2018, she won the International Society for Neglected Tropical Diseases (ISNTD) Water Award for Research, in recognition of the quality of her research on the linkages between hydrometeorological extremes and dengue outbreaks and the multi-sectoral relevance for policy and practice.

My research is inspired by nature and uses its design principles to create materials that seamlessly interface with living matter to develop new paradigms for biomaterials and biomedicine. I focus on introducing new concepts for biointerfaces and “quasi-living” synthetic cells that can harbor selective interactions with cells and tissues. These synthetic cells will enable biologically inspired but augmented or even completely new functions to open new horizons for biomedicine, sensing, and therapeutics. Moreover, this research holds promise to unveil some of the most daunting questions related to the origin of life, the transition from inanimate to living, and the emergence of diseases.

Leticia Tarruell is an experimental physicist. She uses ultracold (nanokelvin) atomic gases to synthesize artificial quantum matter and investigate the properties of quantum many-body systems. Her research thus lies at the crossing between quantum optics and condensed-matter physics. Currently, she is particularly interested in the investigation of unconventional superfluid phases, such as ultradilute quantum liquids, chiral Bose-Einstein condensates and topological superfluids, in mixtures of quantum gases in the continuum (ERC Consolidator grant 2021-2026), and in the microscopic study of quantum magnetism with large spin Fermi gases in optical lattices.