A thesis on malaria prevention wins the 17th Doctors' Senate Award of the UB

John Jairo Aponte (Bogotá, Colombia, 1966) won the Ramon Margalef Prize conferred by the Board of Trustees of the UB in 2012. The awarded study was issued as a recommendation for the control of malaria in infants by the World Health Organization: the intermittent treatment with antimalarial drugs in children (IPTi) with sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine. Nowadays, John Jairo Aponte continues researching on this issue. He is a CRESIB scientist, the research centre of ISGlobal, affiliated with HUBc, the health campus of international excellence of the UB.

The jury conferred the second prize on the researcher Elena Azañón, from the Department of Basic Psychology of the Faculty of Psychology, for her work Remapping touch from skin to space, supervised by Professor Salvador Soto Faraco, ICREA researcher at Pompeu Fabra University. Her thesis first identifies the brain area responsible for integrating ocular reaction to tactile stimulation with motor response. Her study was published in the journal Current Biology.

The third prize was conferred on researcher Oriol Vaz-Romero for his thesis El artista y el juguete: viajes al imaginario occidental, desde la Antigüedad al Romanticismo (Lʼartiste et le jouet: voyages dans lʼimaginaire occidental, de lʼAntiquité au Romantisme), co-directed by professors Miquel Quílez, from the Department of Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, and Michel Manson, from Paris 13 University. The study is centred on artistic and literary works developed by ancient civilizations, from Mediterranean cultures to Near East traditions.

Moreover, the jury conferred a certificate on the following shortlisted researchers: Rodrigo Almeda, for his thesis dissertation Ecophysiology of marine invertebrate planktonic larvae: species and community level approach, co-supervised by Albert Calbet and Miquel Alcaraz, from the Department of Ecology of the Faculty of Biology, and Juan Fortea, for his thesis dissertation Estudios multimodales de resonancia magnética y de líquido cefalorraquídeo en la enfermedad de Alzheimer preclínica familiar y esporádica, co-supervised by David Bartrés Faz and José Luis Molinuevo, from the Department of Medicine of the Faculty of Medicine.

The main goal of the Doctorsʼ Senate Award is to officially acknowledge those doctoral theses read and defended at the UB which make particularly valuable contributions to scientific progress and the advancement of human knowledge. This year, theses read in 2011 have been awarded. A total of 118 candidates from different subject areas were presented. Their work covered practically all of the science and humanities disciplines offered at the UB.

The jury, chaired by the rector, Dídac Ramírez, was composed by UB professors and lecturers Joan Bosch, vice-president of the Doctorsʼ Senate, M. Rosa Buxarrais, Marta Giralt, Carme Junqué, Ramon Bartrons, José Manuel Parra, Xavier M. Triadó, and Jaume Mascaró, who acted as jury secretary.