Prof. Laura Lechuga receives the 2020 Ada Byron Award to Women Technologist

by Virginia Greco

The 2020 Ada Byron Award and Ada Byron Young Award to Women Technologist have been conferred respectively to Prof. Laura Lechuga, CSIC research professor and group leader at the ICN2, and to Prof. Susana Ladra González, professor at the University of A Coruña.

Prof. Laura Lechuga Gomez, leader of the ICN2 Nanobiosensors and Bioanalytical Applications Group, has been honoured with the 2020 Ada Byron Award to Women Technologist, conferred by the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Deusto (Bilbao, Spain). The Ada Byron Young Award has been assigned to Prof. Susana Ladra González, professor of Languages and Computer Systems at the University of A Coruña. The awards will be conferred on October 29 during the ForoTech 2020, Deusto Engineering and Technology Week.

The Ada Byron Award to Women Technologist, which has now reached its seventh edition, aims to draw attention to the excellent record of current and outstanding women working in technology contributing in various scientific disciplines, as English mathematician Ada Byron did herself. This award is sponsored by Microsoft, the Provincial Council (Diputación Foral) of Bizkaia, the Danobat Group and the Emakunde-Basque Institute for Women; it can also count on the collaboration of the Innobasque and Basque HealthCluster.

A chemist by training, Prof. Lechuga is currently CSIC research professor at the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2), but she also works for the Center for Networked Biomedical Research in Bioengineering, Biomaterials and Nanomedicine (CIBER-BBN) at the Carlos III Institute of Health. She has been an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Technology at the University of the Arctic (Norway) (2012-2016), and a distinguished visiting professor in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the State University of Campinas (Brazil) (2013-2017).

Author of more than 2700 publications and of 8 families of patents, Prof. Lechuga is now leading and coordinating at the ICN2 the CoNVaT project, one of the 17 projects selected in the European Commission's call for proposals to advance our knowledge about the COVID-19 virus and its impact on infected people. During the coronavirus crisis, she has also been an expert advisor to the Ministry of Science and Innovation and to the Spanish Government.