New ICREAs

ICREA is an expanding community. Each year, new research professors join ICREA after the ICREA call. This is a list of the most recent incorporations. We would like give them all a very warm welcome to the ICREA community: Benvinguts!

Marco Armiero

Humanities
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)
1 Jan, 2023
view profile
Marco Armiero

Since 2019 I am the president of the European Society for Environmental History, a recognition of my work in that field. Although rooted in that discipline, I have developed a transdisciplinary research agenda blending environmental history with political ecology and environmental humanities. In 2013 I became the director of the Environmental Humanities Laboratory in Stockholm making it a global player in that emerging field.  My research clusters around three topics: environmental justice; migrations and the environment; and fascism and nature. Methodologically, I avoid any dichotomy between nature and society. Thematically, from toxicity to fascism, from migration to mountain communities, my research focuses on processes of expropriations and imposition of expert knowledge and the resistance of subaltern communities.

Vladimir Asriyan

Social & Behavioural Sciences
Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional (CREI)
1 Jan, 2023
view profile
Vladimir Asriyan

Vladimir Asriyan is ICREA Research Professor at CREi, Research Fellow at the CEPR, and an Affiliated Professor at the Barcelona School of Economics. He was born in Yerevan, Armenia and, prior to moving to Barcelona, obtained a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California-Berkeley and a B.A. in Economics and Mathematics from the University of California-San Diego. His research lies at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance, and its broad objective is to understand how imperfections --  e.g., due to information asymmetries or agency problems among economic agents -- hinder the functioning of financial markets, how this impacts the economy at large, and what implications this has for corrective policy. His research has furthered our understanding of the origins of financial crises and how policymakers should aim to manage these economic phenomena. 

Daniel Brockington

Social & Behavioural Sciences
Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals - UAB (ICTA-UAB)
1 Dec, 2022
view profile
Dan Brockington

I have worked on different aspects of conservation social science using interdisciplinary approaches to explore, inter alia, the social impacts of conservation policy, the work of NGOs, the role of media and celebrity, and the challenges of measuring change in data poor environments. My books include Fortress Conservation, Nature Unbound (with Rosaleen Duffy and Jim Igoe), Celebrity and the Environment, Celebrity Advocacy and International Development, Prosperity in Rural Africa? (with Christine Noe) and Contested Sustainability (with Stefano Ponte and Christine Noe). I was awarded an Advanced ERC for a five year project on Conservation Data Justice in 2022. Outside academia I have recently completed a trilogy for middle grade readers that is published by African Professional Education Network in Dar es Salaam.

Paula Bustos

Social & Behavioural Sciences
Institute for Political Economy and Governance (IPEG)
1 Sep, 2022
view profile
Paula Bustos

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.

Davide Debortoli

Social & Behavioural Sciences
Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)
1 Jan, 2023
view profile
Davide Debortoli

Davide Debortoli is ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, a Research Professor at the Barcelona School of Economics, an Associate Researcher at CREi, a Research Fellow of the CEPR and an Associate Editor at the Journal of Monetary Economics. His research interests are in the area of macroeconomics. He has studied the implications of (lack of) government credibility for the design of monetary policies, fiscal policies and public debt management. More recently, he is investigating the role of household heterogeneity and inequality for understanding aggregate economic fluctuations and the associated policy implications. In 2022, he was awarded the Wim Duisenberg Fellowship from the European Central Bank.

María Escudero

Experimental Sciences & Mathematics
Institut Català de Nanociència i Nanotecnologia (ICN2)
1 Sep, 2022
view profile
María Escudero Escribano

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.

Maria Carolina Florian

Life & Medical Sciences
Institut d'Investigació Biomèdica de Bellvitge (IDIBELL)
1 Feb, 2023
view profile
Carlolina Florian

M. Carolina Florian is ICREA Research Professor and leads the Stem Cell Aging group at IDIBELL and PCMR-C. She obtained her Master of Science in Pharmaceutical Biotechnology and her PhD in Endocrinology from the University of Milan, Italy. She did her postdoctoral training in Hematopoietic Stem Cell Biology at the University of Ulm, Germany. Her research strongly challenges the concept that aging is an irreversible process. She investigates the role of the epigenetic remodeling and of the stem cell microenvironment in driving aging of somatic stem cells. Her work demonstrates that it is possible to target aging and functionally rejuvenate stem cells and tissues to extend health- and lifespan.

Mariona Graupera

Life & Medical Sciences
Institut de Recerca contra la Leucèmia Josep Carreras (IJC)
1 Jan, 2023
view profile
Mariona Graupera

Dr. Mariona Graupera is an ICREA Research professor and a Group Leader at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute. She studies how signaling events regulate vessel morphogenesis, and how this knowledge can be translated into therapeutic opportunities for diseases characterized by aberrant vessel growth. Current topics of interest are (i) How the endothelium instructs organ function in an organotypic fashion, (ii) How mural cell plasticity can be targeted to prevent disease pathogenesis and progression, and (iii) Why there is distinct endothelial spatio-temporal sensitivity to oncogenic mutations. Her research combines zebrafish and mouse models, patient derived samples, high-throughput analysis (NGS, single cell RNA sequencing, (phospho)proteomics) and high-resolution imaging. She has held a visiting position at the Rockefeller University, and she is currently the president of the European Vascular Biology Organization (EVBO).

Seth M. Holmes

Social & Behavioural Sciences
Universitat de Barcelona (UB)
1 Feb, 2023
view profile
Seth Holmes

Seth M. Holmes, PhD, MD, runs the Project FOODCIRCUITS (ERC 2023-2028) in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona. He is also External Member of the Medical Anthropology Research Center of the University of Rovira i Virgili and Chancellor's Professor at the University of California, Berkeley where he founded the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine. A sociocultural anthropologist and medical doctor, he conducts interdisciplinary research on social hierarchies, health inequities, and the ways in which such asymmetries are naturalized, normalized, and resisted in the contexts of transnational migration, health care, and agricultural food systems. He has received national and international awards from the fields of anthropology, sociology, and geography, including the Margaret Mead Award. Beyond scholarly writing, he has written for popular media such as The Guardian and The Huffington Post, spoken on multiple National Public Radio, Public Radio International, and Radio Bilingüe radio programs, and produced an ethnographic documentary film that received several film festival awards. 

Evelina Leivada

Humanities
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)
1 Jan, 2023
view profile
Evelina Leivada

Evelina Leivada is an ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, working at the Department of Catalan Philology and the Center of Theoretical Linguistics. Her research focuses on language development in monolingual, bilingual, and bidialectal populations, and involves creating comparative profiles that shed light on how aspects of the developmental trajectory affect language growth and its final outcome. She has tested extensively various domains of morphosyntax in typical and atypical populations that speak different (combinations of) languages. Evelina’s research has a strong interdisciplinary character, using notions, theories, tools, and methods from theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience. Her research has been funded by the European Commission, the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, the Martí i Franquès COFUND Programme, the Tromsø Research Foundation, the A. G. Leventis Foundation, and the Cyprus State Scholarship Foundation.

Marcos Malumbres

Life & Medical Sciences
Vall d'Hebron Institut d'Oncologia (VHIO)
1 Jan, 2023
view profile
Marcos Malumbres

Marcos Malumbres leads a research group at the Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology focused on mechanisms of cell cycle control and novel therapeutic strategies to prevent tumor cell proliferation. He has developed extensive genetic models and tools to evaluate the relevance and therapeutic opportunities of targeting specific cell cycle biochemical activities. He is currently working in tight collaboration with clinicians and pharma companies to fill the gap between basic discoveries and the application of these findings to specific cancer patient populations with the appropriate drugs. Recent research is strongly based on the generation and use of patient-derived models and single-cell technologies to understand cancer evolution and response to treatments. He is an EMBO elected member and Visiting Professor at Dana Farber Cancer Institute (Harvard, Boston).

Ivan Markovsky

Engineering Sciences
Centre Internacional de Mètodes Numèrics a Enginyeria (CIMNE)
1 Jan, 2023
view profile
Ivan Markovsky

My Ph.D. is in electrical engineering from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. From 2006 to 2012 I was a lecturer at the School of Electronics and Computer Science of the University of Southampton, U.K. and from 2012 to 2022 a research professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. My expertise is in system identification and data-driven control. In 2010, I was awarded an ERC starting grant for a structured low-rank approximation approach to data-driven control. Current topics of interest are data-driven methods for nonlinear, time-varying, and distributed systems.

Tamer Nawar

Humanities
Universitat de Barcelona (UB)
1 Jan, 2023
view profile
Tamer Nawar

Tamer Nawar is a philosopher who works on the history of philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language of logic. Appointed ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona in January 2023, he is leading a research project ‘Truth in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy’, funded by the European Research Council. From 2015 to 2022, he was Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Groningen. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford and obtained his PhD at the University of Cambridge. He has held visiting positions at the University of Tokyo and the University of Waseda, and has also been Nelson Distinguished Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Hector Orengo

Humanities
Institut Català d'Arqueologia Clàssica (ICAC)
1 Dec, 2022
view profile
Héctor Orengo

Hector A. Orengo is an ICREA Research Professor at the Catalan Institute of Classical Archaeology, where he serves as Research Coordinator and co-directs the Landscape Archaeology Research Group (GIAP). He is also currently an Honorary Research Associate at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge. His research has mainly focused on the analysis of human-landscape dynamics in Mediterranean environments and beyond. He has developed extensive research on computational archaeology that includes, but is not restricted to, GIS and remote sensing techniques, field survey, and site detection methods. He is currently working on the application of machine learning to archaeological research using cloud computing and big data sources (mostly multisource multitemporal satellite data, drone imagery and lidar).

Rodrigo Quian Quiroga

Life & Medical Sciences
Institut Hospital del Mar d'Investigacions Mèdiques (IMIM)
1 May, 2023
view profile
Rodrigo Quian Quiroga

Rodrigo Quian Quiroga is an ICREA Research Professor, working at the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM). Before moving to Barcelona, he was the director of the Centre for Systems Neuroscience and the head of Bioengineering at the University of Leicester in the UK. His main research is on the study of visual perception and memory, developing advanced data processing tools and performing electrophysiology and multiple single neuron recordings in epileptic patients implanted with intracranial electrodes for clinical reasons. He discovered what have been named "Concept Cells" or "Jennifer Aniston neurons"—neurons in the human brain that are uniquely human and that play a key role in memory formation and storage. He is a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, was awarded a President International Fellowship by Chinese Academy of Sciences, and was selected as one of the 10 RISE Leaders in Science and Engineering in the UK. 

Alejo Rodriguez

Life & Medical Sciences
Institut de Recerca Biomèdica (IRB Barcelona)
1 Jan, 2023
view profile
Alejo Rodríguez-Fraticelli

I was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and I obtained my PhD in Developmental Cell Biology from the Autonomous University of Madrid in 2014. I then trained as a postdoctoral fellow at the Stem Cell Program of Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard University. In my early career, I established various novel methods for studying the fates of individual stem cells, combining lineage tracing and single-cell sequencing to identify determinants of blood formation. In 2021, I joined IRB Barcelona, where I now lead a multidisciplinary team that focuses on stem cell aging and premalignancy. We aim to identify and target drivers of blood cell aging and prevent their progression towards chronic inflammation and cancer. For this, we deploy advanced genetic tools, such as gene editing, to record cellular lineages and signals, as they happen inside an organism, and then we study how this information affects cellular behaviors. Our work has been recognized with prestigious awards and grants, including the ASH Scholar Award, the NHLBI K99 award, the Cris Cancer Excelencia Grant, and the ERC Starting Grant.      

Verena Ruprecht

Life & Medical Sciences
Centre de Regulació Genòmica (CRG)
1 Dec, 2022
view profile
Verena Ruprecht

I am driven by the question how the shape and body plan of an organism emerges from a single fertilised cell. Our research bridges the fields of biology, biophysics and engineering to understand how tissues of defined form and function are build from dynamic processes at the single cell level. We study mechanisms of cellular information processing and how mechanical forces control cellular morphodynamics and cell and tissue plasticity. We employ quantitative in vivo methods, biophysical tools and advanced fluorescence microscopy and we further design synthetic bottom up assays to control cell behaviours and study principles of multicellular selforganisation. With our research we ultimately aim to understand how tissue form and function is robustly built during development and its implications for tissue homeostasis and cancer.

Arnau Sebé-Pedrós

Life & Medical Sciences
Centre de Regulació Genòmica (CRG)
1 Jan, 2023
view profile
Arnau Sebé-Pedrós

I am an evolutionary biologist interested in how genome sequence and its regulation translate into diverse cellular phenotypes. I obtained a Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of Barcelona and I then was a postdoctoral fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science. In my group, we investigate the evolution of cell type programs and associated genome regulation. When did major animal cell types like neurons emerge? How do gene regulatory networks evolve? And how these genetic changes translate into cellular novelties? To answer these questions, we combine single-cell genomics, chromatin profiling, and comparative genomics methods in a phylogenetically diverse array of animals and unicellular eukaryotes.

Joshua Shepherd

Humanities
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)
1 May, 2023
view profile
Joshua Shepherd

Joshua Shepherd works on issues in the philosophy of psychology and action, as well as in neuroethics. He is an ICREA Professor at the Universität Autonoma de Barcelona, a Senior Fellow with the LOGOS research group, and the PI of the project Rethinking Conscious Agency, funding by an ERC Starting Grant. He has also been an Associate Professor at Carleton University, a Global Scholar with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, and a Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. His first book, Consciousness and Moral Status, was published by Routledge. His second book, The Shape of Agency: Control, Action, Skill, Knowledge, was published by Oxford University Press.

Alexander Taylor

Social & Behavioural Sciences
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)
1 Mar, 2023
view profile
Alex Taylor

Alex Taylor is an ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, whose research focuses on mapping the similarities between different types of intelligence. He obtained his bachelor’s degree at Oxford University and his PhD at the University of Auckland. After working as a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, he worked at the University of Auckland from 2012-23, where he was awarded, by the Royal Society of New Zealand, both a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship (2014-19), and the Prime Minister’s Emerging Scientist prize (2015). In 2022, he was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant (2023-2028) for his project ‘UNIPROB’ which aims to establish if human-like probabilistic inference has convergently evolved in the kea parrot.

Andrea Wulzer

Experimental Sciences & Mathematics
Institut de Física d'Altes Energies (IFAE)
1 Oct, 2022
view profile
Andrea Wulzer

I am a particle physicist. My mission is to unveil the microscopic laws that govern the fundamental particles and their interactions. I study what these laws could be, and how they manifest as concrete predictions for a multitude of experimental measurements that are being and will be performed at particle colliders. Devising strategies to extract maximal information on fundamental physics laws from the data collected at the Large Hadron Collider is a main focus of my research. Another goal is to identify new pathways for further progress at ambitious future collider projects and in particular at a muon collider of very high energy. I attack these questions by employing and developing theoretical tools for predictions based on the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics and special relativity, combined in what is known as "Quantum Field Theory", as well as statistical tools for comparing the predictions with the experimental data.