Network Science Society honours experts Albert Díaz-Guilera and Maria Ángeles Serrano
The experts Albert Díaz-Guilera and Maria Ángeles Serrano, members of the Faculty of Physics and the Institute of Complex Systems of the University of Barcelona (UBICS), have been awarded as fellows of the Network Science Society (NetSci), a prestigious scientific society that promotes research, collaboration and knowledge transfer on an international scale in the field of complex networks.
The experts Albert Díaz-Guilera and Maria Ángeles Serrano, members of the Faculty of Physics and the Institute of Complex Systems of the University of Barcelona (UBICS), have been awarded as fellows of the Network Science Society (NetSci), a prestigious scientific society that promotes research, collaboration and knowledge transfer on an international scale in the field of complex networks.
Every year, the Network Science Society honours up to seven representatives of the international scientific community for excellence in research on complex networks, from a multidisciplinary perspective that encompasses disciplines such as computer science, biology, biophysics, social sciences and economics. This year’s awards were presented at the NetSci 2024 Conference, which took place from 16 to 21 June in Quebec City, Canada.
Albert Díaz-Guilera, professor at the UB’s Department of Condensed Matter Physics and director of the UBICS, receives the award in recognition “of his decisive work on the analysis of network communities and the dynamical consequences of structural complexity in synchronization phenomena”.
Díaz-Guilera graduated in Physics at the UB (1983) and a gained PhD from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (1987. He is a member of the Complexity Lab Barcelona (CLAbB) at the UB and has collaborated with institutions such as Imperial College London (UK), Northwestern University (USA), and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Change Impact Research (Germany), and founded and coordinated the Catalan network for the study of complex systems (complexitat.cat).
The professor has focused his research career on general aspects of complexity, especially on complex networks. As a statistical physicist, he has developed lines of research of a transversal and multidisciplinary nature — biology, economics, social sciences, computer science, linguistics, etc. — in which he has worked on mechanostatistical techniques applied to economics and business organization, and the topological and dynamic properties of complex networks in nature and society.
Maria Ángeles Serrano is an ICREA researcher in the Department of Condensed Matter Physics and the UBICS, and directs the Complexity Lab Barcelona at the UB. She has received the Network Science Society award “for fundamental advances in network theory, including geometric modelling of real-world graphs and networks, the geometric renormalization group, and interdisciplinary applications to systems in biology, society and technology”.
External professor at the CSH Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, she holds a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the UB and a master’s degree in Financial Mathematics from the Centre for Research in Mathematics (CRM). She has completed postdoctoral stays at Indiana University (USA), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (Switzerland) and the Institute of Interdisciplinary Physics and Complex Systems (University of the Balearic Islands-CSIC).
Serrano has excelled in the field of research on the surprising features that arise in the structure, function and evolution of complex systems, a line of work with outstanding applications covering a wide variety of real systems, from biological systems to economic and sociotechnological networks. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal APS Physical Review Research and also received the Outstanding Referee Award