13 July 2023
Madrid Headquarters
The Faculty of Engineering at the University of Deusto presented the Ada Byron Award for Women Technologists on 13 July in Madrid, which is now in its 10th year. The winners were María José Escalona Cuaresma, from Seville, in the senior category, and Sara García Alonso, from León, in the under 35 category.
The event was attended by the Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, Asier Perallos; the secretary of the Ministry of Science and Innovation, Teresa Riesgo; the deputy for Employment, Social Cohesion and Equality of the Biscay Regional Council, Teresa Laespada; as well as other representatives of the University and public and private entities that support this award. Also this year, as it was the 10th anniversary of the award, a number of past award winners were present, three of whom spoke at the ceremony: Asunción Gómez, winner of the 2015 Ada Byron Award and newly elected member of the Real Academia de la Lengua; Concepción Monje, winner of the 2019 Ada Byron Prize; and Laura Lechuga, winner of the 2020 Ada Byron Prize and winner of the Spanish National Research Award.
The aim of the award is to encourage women's vocations in the field of technological research and development, to highlight the importance of technology in all areas of life and in social development, and acknowledge the work and achievements that women's performance of these tasks and studies have contributed to humanity.
It has the gold sponsorship of Microsoft, as well as that of Red Hat, the Biscay Regional Council, Danobatgroup and Emakunde-Basque Women's Institute; and the collaboration of Innobasque.
Science and technology, the basis of the future
The Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, Asier Perallos, stressed that "Universities have the duty to address the challenges facing society, and to be attentive to companies' needs and requests to adapt to them. At Deusto we have fifteen thousand students each academi year, distributed into 46 university degrees; and one of our faculties is the Faculty of Engineering, which for 40 years has been educating professionals who are in constant contact with businesses, which increasingly need more engineers, and whose demand is one of the objectives of this award that we are presenting for the first time in Madrid". Asier Perallos remarked that "science and technology are the basis of our future, and the example of our award winners will serve as a stimulus for many others to follow this path".
As in previous years, the award winners are women with a long and prestigious professional career. María José Escalona, the senior winner, is a professor at the University of Seville's Department of Computer Languages and Systems. She is director of the Engineering and Science for Software System research group and her research focuses on software and requirements engineering and, in general, on people-centred software. She gained her PhD with international mention in 2004 and since then, she has developed more than 200 publications in international and national forums. She has supervised and tutored several doctoral theses and various national and international research projects. She has worked on projects related to the socio-economic sphere, projects with companies, a patent and a large number of software registrations being exploited. She has held management positions both at her university and in state bodies and is actively involved in various national and international forums and advisory groups.
The young prize winner, Sara García Alonso, is a senior researcher at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) and a member of the European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut reserve. She graduated in Biotechnology from the University of León and, during her university studies, she trained in several laboratories and completed her master's degree specialising in Biomedicine. Subsequently, she moved to the Cancer Research Centre (2013-2018), where she obtained her PhD cum laude in Cancer Molecular Biology and Translational Medicine, obtaining the Outstanding PhD Award for the best doctoral thesis in Medicine from the University of Salamanca. During this stage, she worked on the identification of therapeutic targets and drug resistance mechanisms in several types of cancer. In 2019, she joined Dr Mariano Barbacid's lab at the CNIO, where she has made significant advances in the study of KRAS-driven lung adenocarcinoma. Her work is having a major impact on the identification of targeted therapies for this type of cancer. In 2022 she was selected as a reserve astronaut in the European Astronaut Corps, becoming the first Spanish woman to do so.
Over one hundred and sixty candidates
In its 10th edition, the Ada Byron Award for Women Technologists has broken all records by receiving and evaluating 166 nominations. The candidates represent a range of talent and skills in the technology field in Spain. These women have demonstrated outstanding commitment in their respective fields, contributing significantly to innovation and technological progress. Their profiles include their extensive scientific and research output, their commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals, outreach, and their vocation for improving human and environmental health through technology.
As usual, the participating women technologists have a varied geographical origin, as well as diverse backgrounds, with a special emphasis on professionals in the fields of Biotechnology, Aeronautics, Chemistry, Agricultural Engineering, Industrial Engineering and Computer and Electronics. The candidates come from a variety of sectors, including academia, industry, entrepreneurship and government, demonstrating the broad application of technology in different fields.
In addition to the Spanish award, the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Deusto has five other awards in five countries in the Americas: Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia and Chile; and is working to extend it to Brazil.
In the Spanish award over the last ten years, some of the award winners include the following: Montserrat Meya, an expert in artificial intelligence and machine translation; Asunción Gómez, researcher in so-called "semantic technologies"; Nuria Oliver, director of R&D Telefonica; Regina Llopis Rivas, PhD in Mathematics Applied to Artificial Intelligence from the University of California Berkeley (United States); María Ángeles Martín Prats, lecturer in the Electronic Engineering Departmentat the University of Seville; Concepción Alicia Monje Micheret, researcher in Robotics and lecturer at the University of Carlos III University in Madrid; Laura María Lechuga Gómez, researcher in the Electronic Engineering Departmentat the University of Seville; Concepción Alicia Monje Micheret, researcher in Robotics and senior lecturer at the Carlos III University of Madrid; Laura María Lechuga Gómez, graduate in Chemistry and coordinator of one of the European projects for the study of COVID-19; Elena García Armada, PhD in Industrial Engineering, scientific researcher at CSIC and president of MarsiBionics; and Lourdes Verdes Montenegro, scientist and researcher specialising in radio astronomical observations.
The winners of the Ada Byron Youth Prize in previous years include: Ana Freire, an engineer and PhD in Computer Science, researcher and lecturer at the School of Engineering at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona); Susana Ladra González, PhD in Computer Science and graduate in Mathematics; Jordina Torrents Barrena, PhD in the field of artificial intelligence from the Universitat Pompeu Fabraand Julia Guiomar Niso Galán, PhD in Biomedical Engineering and researcher in the study of early markers of Alzheimer's disease.
