To commemorate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, five female researchers from the Institute of Space Sciences will be part of the 100tífiques initiative organised by the Catalan Foundation for Research and Innovation (FCRi) and the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (BIST). They will give online talks to primary and secondary school students in Catalonia about the work of a scientist and their experience as women in the field of science and research.
The female researchers who will participate in this initiative on February 11th are:
Cristina Manuel Hidalgo, a theoretical physicist. She is especially interested in the “condensed matter of the strong (or quantum chomodynamics) interactions” and she focuses on finding their signatures in astrophysical and cosmological scenarios. Her research lines are: quantum chromodynamics under extreme conditions; quark matter, and signatures in compact stars; quark-gluon plasma; and astroparticle.
Nanda Rea has a PhD in Astrophysics on neutron stars and black holes. She comes from Italy and has recently collaborated with Catalan Foundation for Research and Innovation (FCRi) in the initiative #Path2Integrity toward an ethical innovation path in research. She is the main researcher of a Horizon 2020 COST action on neutron stars. She has focused on magnetars, neutron stars with high speed of rotation and extremely strong magnetic fields and she discovered the first magnetar with a weak magnetic field. Last year she received an award in Science and Engineering from Banco Sabadell Foundation and an award from the Royal Academy of Sciences of Spain Foundation for Young Female Scientific Talent in 2019, among other awards.
Vanessa Graber, originally from Germany, is a theoretical astrophysicist and a senior postdoctoral researcher. She is a member of the European COST Action network PHAROS, which focuses on the multi-messenger physics and astrophysics of neutron stars. Her work is mainly focused on two research areas: the interface between astrophysics and condensed matter physics and the population synthesis of isolated neutron stars.
She currently works with Nanda Rea on the newly funded ERC project Magnesia, that focuses on providing a census of galactic magnetars: “Census of magnetars: the impact of highly magnetic neutron stars in the explosive and transitory universe”.
Helena Domínguez Sánchez is a research astronomer and post-doctoral fellow at ICE. Her work focuses on galaxy formation and evolution from an observational point of view. Her aim is to understand how and why the properties of galaxies have changed across the history of the Universe. During the last few years, she developed expertise in machine learning and she is pioneering the use of deep learning techniques in astronomy.
Laura Tolós is a physicist and researcher focused on the theoretical study of matter under conditions of extreme temperatura or density, such as those that can be observed in stellar objects, such as neutron stars. She is involved in the scientific design of the eXTP X-ray satellite, together with Nanda Rea, among other researchers.
In addition, next February 18th researcher Mar Mezcua will be one of the 75 astrophysicists available to talk about her research and her experience as a woman in science within the initiative "Chat with an astronomer" organised by the Women and Astronomy commission of the Spanish Astronomical Society (SEA) and sponsored by the Varela López Family in memory of Angelines and Arturo, and by the PureChat platform. Mar Mezcua is a postdoctoral researcher who studies how supermassive black holes form and grow and how this growth affects the galaxy itself.
