The awards, promoted by the Government and the Catalan Foundation for Research and Innovation (FCRI), have celebrated their 36th edition this year. The ceremony took place at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, presided over by the President of the Government of Catalonia, Salvador Illa, and the Catalan Minister for Research and Universities, Núria Montserrat. In addition to Blagorodnova, other awardees were Luis Serrano, who received the National Research Award; the Eurecat Foundation, which received the National Award for the Transfer of Knowledge and Innovation; the ARI Project (Assistance and Research in Immunotherapy), honoured with the National Award for Patronage and Public-Private Scientific Collaboration; the University of Lleida and the University of Sherbrooke (Canada), recipients of the National Award for Innovation in the Creation of a Science-Based Company, and science communicator Pere Estupinyà, awarded the “Joan Guinovart i Cirera” National Award for Scientific Communication.

Nadejda Blagorodnova Mujortova’s research focuses on time-domain observational astronomy, which studies transient astrophysical phenomena such as supernovae, stellar mergers or stars torn apart by supermassive black holes. With the Common Envelope Transients – Progenitors, Precursors, and Properties of their Outbursts (CET-3PO) research group, funded by a grant from the European Research Council (ERC), she studies the interaction and merger of close binary stars. These studies combine stellar evolution models with observations from the most advanced ground-based telescopes, such as the Gran Telescopio de Canarias, the Very Large Telescope (Chile) and the Southern African Large Telescope (South Africa), and observations from space telescopes such as Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope.