Adriana Nadal, a predoctoral researcher at the Physical Cosmology group at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) and the Institute of Space Sciences of Catalonia (IEEC), has been awarded the Jordi Porta i Jué Award by the Catalan Society of Physics of the Institute of Catalan Studies (IEC). Nadal was honored for her master’s thesis titled "Testing the robustness of the BAO determination in the presence of massive neutrinos," completed as part of the Master's in Astrophysics, Particle Physics and Cosmology at the University of Barcelona.

The award ceremony took place on Tuesday, April 23rd, coinciding with Sant Jordi's Day, at the IEC social quarters and was presided over by IEC President Teresa Cabré. The Jordi Porta i Jué Award is a significant component of the IEC’s Sant Jordi Awards, which aim to promote scientific research and the dissemination of all elements of Catalan culture.

Nadal’s master thesis made significant contributions to the field of cosmology, focusing on the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO), one of the primary probes of cosmology today. Her research studied and quantified the impact of built-in assumptions of the data analysis pipeline on the measurement of the isotropic BAO peak, particularly in the context of massive neutrinos. This work was supervised by ICCUB researchers Héctor Gil Marin (ICCUB-IEEC) and Licia Verde (ICREA-ICCUB).

Now continuing her academic journey, Adriana Nadal is a predoctoral researcher at ICCUB, where she is working on her doctoral thesis titled "Developing tools for the analysis of DESI data employing higher-order statistics," under the guidance of Héctor Gil Marin and Licia Verde. Her ongoing research promises to further advance our understanding of the universe through innovative analytical techniques.

For more information about Adriana Nadal's research and the work of the Physical Cosmology group at ICCUB, please visit ICCUB’s website.