Carme Rovira has been awarded the Premi Ciutat de Barcelona in the category of Experimental Sciences and Technology. She is a Research Professor funded by ICREA, the prestigious Catalan Institute of Research and Advanced Studies, at the University of Barcelona (UB) and is a user of RES, the Spanish Supercomputing Network and PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe. Dr. Rovira receives this award today “for her contributions to unravelling the mechanisms of enzyme function through computational methods and, specifically, for her recent results in the design of new catalysts for the chemical transformation of carbohydrates. In the future, these results will lead to the design of new drugs.”
Dr. Rovira’s research work focuses on the fields of theoretical chemistry and computational biology. She is an ICREA Research Professor in the Department of Inorganic and Organic Chemistry of the UB and is a member of the Institute of Theoretical and Computational Chemistry (IQTCUB). She has been a user of RES resources since 2006 and, since then, has been granted access to the resources for more than 90 activities and 20 million computational hours on the MareNostrum and MinoTauro supercomputers. In the moment of receiving this award, she was the Chair of the RES Users’ Committee (CURES).
The Ciutat de Barcelona Prizes are awarded by the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona, the city’s institute for culture, and recognise excellence in creativity, research and artistic production achieved in Barcelona. The awards ceremony took place the 16th of February, with Mayor, Ada Colau, and Deputy Mayor Jaume Collboni in attendance
BSC Associate Director, Josep M. Martorell, was part of the jury that unanimously awarded the prize to Dr. Rovira. Martorell says “this award recognises the valuable work done by Dr. Rovira and is important because it also highlights the necessity of supercomputing resources provided by institutions like BSC, through networks like RES and PRACE, for the development of quality research. We wholeheartedly congratulate Carme on this well-deserved award.”
