In order to celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, the Institute of Cosmos Sciences releases each day of this week one piece on one of its most renowned researchers.

Today we look into Carme Jordi research:

Position: Associate Professor

Field: Galaxy Structure and Evolution

Research: Her research field includes the physical characterization of single and binary stars and open clusters (young groups of stars in the galactic disc and born from the same molecular cloud), based on astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic observations from ground and space facilities.

She has been involved in space missions such as Hipparcos and INTEGRAL of the European Space Agency (ESA). She is fully engaged in the astrometric space project Gaia since the initial steps in 1997. Her first contributions were related with the definition of science goals and design of the photometric instrument, and currently she participates in the photometric data processing and validation activities within the Data Processing and Analysis Consortium.

She is a member of the Gaia Science Team (the scientific advisory body of ESA for this mission) and of the scientific committee of commission "Astronomical photometry and polarimetry" of the International Astronomical Union. To complement the spectroscopic Gaia data, Carme participates in the large Gaia-ESO survey with the VLT@ESO and in the WEAVE@WHT multiobject spectrograph collaboration. She is part of the "Red Española de Gaia" and "Gaia Research for European Astronomy Training" networks for the scientific exploitation of Gaia data.

Carme also participates in outreach activities for high school students and general public.

In order to celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, the Institute of Cosmos Sciences releases each day of this week one piece on one of its most renowned researchers.

Today we look into María Concepción García González research:

Position: ICREA Professor

Field: Particle Physics Phenomenolgy

Research: María Concepción García González is a theoretical particle physicist. She studies the fundamental laws that govern the behaviour of the smallest components of Nature: the elementary particles. She does it by comparing the predictions from different theories with measurements performed at accelerators, where high energy beams of matter are made to collide, as well as in experiments which detect the elementary particles arriving to us from outer space, and which were produced in the burning of the stars or during the reactions occurring in the early Universe. The ultimate goal is two-fold: understand the physical laws of the microcosms as well as how they determine the Universe we live in.

She has written over 100 research papers on particle physics phenomenology, as well as some review articles. She is regularly invited to international meetings and conferences and she has given plenary talks at the most important conferences in her area.

In order to celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, the Institute of Cosmos Sciences releases each day of this week one piece on one of its most renowned researchers.

Today we look into Licia Verde research:

Position: ICREA Professor

Field: Cosmology and Large Scale Structure

Research: Licia Verde is an astrophysicist with interest in cosmology, which is the study of the origin, evolution and composition of the universe.

Her research topics include theoretical cosmology, cosmic microwave background, large-scale structure, statistical applications and data analysis.

She is interested in the study of the "large-scale distribution of galaxies" and the statistical properties of the heat left over from the big bang to shed light on the universe composition, including the dark energy component, and its history.

She is involved with several projects: Sloan Digital Sky survey III, DESI, Euclid.

The last year she was awarded with the Narcis Monturiol medal for their scientific contributions and with the National Research Prize 2018. The jury has valued the work of Licia Verde for its pioneering findings on Universe and to contribute decisively to understand how matter and dark energy are distributed in the universe.

In order to celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, the Institute of Cosmos Sciences releases each day of this week one piece on one of its most renowned researchers.

Today we look into Assumpta Parreño research:

Position: Associate Professor and deputy director of our Institute.

Field: Hadronic, nuclear and Atomic Physics

Research: Assumpta has focused her research career on understanding how nuclei emerge from the interactions between the fundamental degrees of freedom of matter. Subatomic particles, like neutrons and protons, are not elementary. They can be understood as made up of three quarks, which come in different flavors, giving rise to the different types of particles.

One of the fundamental forces in Nature, the strong force, is responsible for binding these quarks into nucleons. The underlying theory (widely accepted) describing the interactions among quarks is Quantum Chromodynamics, according to which, quarks interact through the exchange of massless elementary particles, the gluons.

Unfortunately, at the energy scales in which nuclear phenomena take place, the theory cannot be solved analytically. With the goal of obtaining numerical solutions to the problem,

Assumpta cofounded in 2004 the international Nuclear Physics with Lattice QCD collaboration. Since then, she has joined several initiatives to use super computation to obtain information about how nuclear particles interact, a framework especially relevant on those sectors where experiments are difficult, or even impossible, to perform.

You can watch her describe her research in the following video (in Spanish):

In order to celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, the Institute of Cosmos Sciences releases each day of this week one piece on one of its most renowned researchers.

Today we look into Àngels Ramos research:

Position: Full Professor

Field: Nuclear and Hadron Physics

Research: Àngels Ramos is an international reputated and established researcher on strange nuclear physics (the study of the interactions of subatomic particles containing the strange quark and nuclei) where she introduced new disintegration modes and mechanisms.

She was involved in several pioneer studies that demonstrated that the Λ (1405) baryon (a subatomic particle commonly thought as made up of three quarks, as is the case of protons and neutrons) is better described by a superposition of bound hadron-hadron pairs.

In order to celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, the Institute of Cosmos Sciences releases each day of this week one piece on one of its most renowned researchers.

Today we look into Francesca Figueras research:

Position: Associate Professor

Field: Galaxy Structure and Evolution

Research: Francesca has specialized in the analysis of the movement and physical properties of the stars of the disk of our galaxy with the aim of discovering the mechanisms capable of generating the observed spiral structures. Since 1997 he has been actively participating in the Gaia mission of the European Space Agency (ESA). This satellite is currently continuously observing one billion stars of our galaxy, 1% of its stellar content. She is been actively involved since the begining of the project with the GDAAS (Gaia Data Access and Analysis Study) Phase II, and at present on the validation of the Gaia data (CU9). In 2009 she coordinated "Ella és una astrònoma", in the celebration of the International Year of Astronomy. Francesca is currently the president of the Spanish Astronomy Society.

The Particle Physics Workshop participates at the 1st Biennal Ciutat i Ciència to be held in Barcelona from February 7 to 11. The Biennial organises during five days 70 free dissemination activities distributed in the 10 districts of the city and aims to facilitate the dissemination of scientific knowledge made in Barcelona and strengthen its link with the citizens.

The Particle Physics Workshop aims to bring high school students with special interest in physics closer to one of the most important emerging fields: particle physics. During a day, the students will be able to explore this area with master classes, which the general public can follow through streaming, will make some practical work under the supervision of physicists and will subsequently discuss the results obtained with other participants from around the world.

The Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB), in collaboration with the Societat Catalana de Física, has organised this workshop since 2005. The attendees of the workshop work with real data obtained with the " LHCb Experiment" at CERN, in which researchers from the ICCUB Experimental Particle Physics group have made important scientific contributions. The activity includes a videoconferencing connection with CERN physicists and other groups of students around the world to discuss their results, coordinated by the International Particle Physics Participation Group (IPPOG).

At the end of the day, students will be able to visit the laboratories of the Faculty of Physics of the University of Barcelona.

https://www.biennalciutaticiencia.barcelona/ca/taller-de-fisica-de-particules

"Cosmos. Una inmersión rápida" is a review on what we know of astronomy and the Universe in order to catch up without previous knowledge. The book is part of the collection "Una inmersión rápida", which combining rigour and dissemination,introduces and looks into current issues.

Can you imagine being able to immerse yourself in the immensity of the Cosmos and understand how planets, stars and galaxies are?

The Cosmos has been there much longer than any being that has ever lived on our little planet. Despite this, humans have managed to do something unprecedented: to know our place in it, discover aspects about its origin and revealing the farthest places in the Universe without having travelled there.

However, we live in an era in which all this knowledge advances by leaps and bounds with each new space mission and with each telescope that we inaugurate, being difficult to be up to date without a minimum knowledge base. From the comets to black holes, through planets orbiting other suns, the journey you are about to start summarise what we currently know about the Universe and it will leave you wanting to know more.

José Manuel Carrasco

José Manuel Carrasco is a Physics doctor of the University of Barcelona. He works in the development of the Gaia Mission. Gaia is an ambitious mission which aims to chart a three-dimensional map of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. In the process, it will reveal the composition, formation and evolution of the Galaxy. Gaia will provide unprecedented positional and radial velocity measurements with the accuracies needed to produce a stereoscopic and kinematic census of about one billion stars in our Galaxy and throughout the Local Group. This amounts to about 1 per cent of the Galactic stellar population.

He simultaneously carry on his research, teaching at the University of Barcelona and a lot of activities of science dissemination. He also has the astronomical popularisation project 'Miralcel'.

During the Setmana de la Ciència there are a lot of scientific dissemination activities throughout the Catalan territory: exhibitions, talks, games, scientific workshops ...

The Institute of Cosmos Sciences participates in this celebration with talks given by its members, and also with exhibitions.

'La Setmana de la Ciència' is an initiative coordinated by the Fundació Catalana per a la Recerca i la Innovació.

Check the activities

The awarded researchers work in several different fields such as: High Energy Astrophysics, Galaxy Evolution or Cosmology and Large Scale Structure.

Only 22 international postdoctoral researchers have been chosen to benefit from this excellence grant. The primary condition to receive it is to perform their research in a Severo Ochoa or María the Maeztu accredited centre, as the Institute of Cosmos Sciences. It is a recognition the Spanish government give to certain centres to reward its outstanding research.