11F: International Day of Women and Girls in Science 2021
Feb. 11, 2021
The United Nations General Assembly decided to proclaim 11 February as International Women's and Girls' Day in Science with the goal of achieving full and equal access to science for girls and women.
To date, 23.9 % of the IFISC research staff are women. By category, women represent 31 % of doctoral students, 25 % of postdoctoral researchers and 11 % of permanent research staff. The award of the María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence fostered further initiatives at IFISC for a broader participation of female in STEM including the creation of a Gender equality and woman empowerment committee composed by IFISC researchers Roberta Zambrini and Miguel Cornelles Soriano. This committee has contributed to greater gender equality in the IFISC working environment through a number of actions such as promoting gender balance in hiring procedures and awarded fellowships, getting involved in initiatives at national and international level or promoting the participation of female speakers in seminars and colloquia. A team is starting to prepare an equality plan of the institute: the first meeting is taking place today.
In addition, today, 11 February, we would like to highlight some of the women scientists who carry out their research at IFISC and whose work is essential to the institute.
- Beatriz Arregui works as a María de Maeztu PhD student at IFISC. She is interested in the field of sociophysics and she is currently applying mathematical models and complex networks science in order to study the spreading of infectious diseases.
- Nassima Benchtaber is a PhD student at IFISC, working on Topological states and Transport in Bilayer Graphene. She is studying the case of electrons confinement in the presence of magnetic fields.
- Irene Estébanez is also a María de Maeztu PhD student working on hardware implementations of a machine learning technique known as reservoir computing. Currently, she is using a photonic system for the recovery of optical communication signals.
- Rosa López is a researcher in nanosystems in the field of quantum transport of charge, energy, spin and information. She is currently focusing her research on quantum thermodynamics and how it can be used for more efficient design of machines at the nanoscale with low heat dissipation.
- María Martínez is a María de Maeztu PhD student and her research is focused on power grid dynamics and stability. In particular, she studies the integration of a high ratio of renewable energies and the challenges they introduce in the current energy system.
- Silvia Ortín is postdoctoral researcher at IFISC. Currently, she is working on neuromorphic computing with optical systems in the framework of the European project ADOPD with the objective of developing ultrafast computational units based on optical technologies that take advantage of the information processing principles used by the brain.
- Lucía Ramírez works at IFISC as a María de Maeztu junior postdoc researcher. She is working on information processing in socio-technical and biological systems, studying the evolution of social systems on complex networks.
- Giulia Ruzzene works as a postdoctoral researcher in the framework of the Maria de Maeztu unity of excellence. She is interested in complex systems in general and in particular in nonlinear dynamics and synchronization phenomena. She is currently working on the modelling of power grids.
- Roberta Zambrini is a tenured scientist since 2008, her interests span open and complex quantum systems, synchronization, quantum networks, quantum optics and quantum machine learning.
IFISC staff will also participate in the activity "Just Chatting with women scientists", an online activity in which Balearic Islands researchers will answer questions, chat and interact with attendees via the Twitch platform. The activity will be held on 11 February at 6pm and is organized by the 11F Balears platform.
The objective of the 11F Balears Platform is to give a face and a voice to women who, from institutions, companies or individually, develop their professional and academic activity especially in the field of the STEM sectors, which include science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
The complete list of activities that will be organized in the framework of the 11F can be found in the web 11fbalears.org.
