Ceremony for the Doctors’ Senate Award and the extraordinary doctoral awards


The award went to the thesis Investigations in animal models of anti-NMDAR encephalitis, by Anna García Serra, supervised by Josep Dalmau, lecturer at the Department of Medicine of the UB’s Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences. The study is dedicated to a rare disease, a type of autoimmune encephalitis which affects 1.5 million people every year, and which represents neuropsychiatric symptoms such as epileptic seizures or memory deficit, among others. Anna García says: “the alterations of this disease are largely caused by the effects of specific antibodies against NMDAR. Therefore, we wanted to study, if this encephalitis coincided with a pregnancy, whether the antibodies could reach the developing foetus through the placenta and its brain, and have any pathological consequences”. “Part of the thesis — García continues — has been aimed at demonstrating a possible treatment pathway, similar to that used in other diseases in which antibodies are also a key pathological agent”.
Then, the award was given to Vertebrats postmessinians de Mallorca i Eivissa (Illes Balears, Mediterrània Occidental): descripció, origen i extinció d’espècies, by Enrique Torres Roig, co-supervised by Pere Bover and Josep Antoni Alcover, from the Department of Earth and Ocean Dynamics at the Faculty of Earth Sciences. “The main contribution of this thesis was the collection and description of a series of fossil vertebrates from Mallorca and Ibiza that were previously unknown”, says Enrique Torres. These are fossils from around five million years ago, including, for example, a mouse and a giant hamster (Apodricetus darderi). “One of the biggest surprises was the finding of some small vertebrae among excavation materials from the 1980s and 1990s; I remember it with great excitement because it meant discovering a new taxon (a geological classification): it was a dwarf viper that we described as a new subspecies, Vipera latasei ebusitana”, Torres says.
A runner-up prize was also awarded to Javier Anta Pulido, for his doctoral thesis Historical and conceptual foundations of information physics, supervised by Carl Hoefer, from the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy. This is a broadly multidisciplinary research project. Javier Anta explains that the thesis combines “philosophical methods with historical methods, at the same time as the subject of the research includes disciplines from the natural sciences (statistical physics, black hole physics…) and engineering (communication theory, algorithmic theory of computation, etc.)”.
Finally, two diplomas of recognition were awarded. One for Silvia Panarello, for the thesis Photoswitchable allosteric ligands to modulate metabotropic glutamate receptors, co-supervised by Amadeu Llebaria and Xavier Gómez, from the Department of Biomedical Chemistry, and with the tutor Vicente Marchán, from the Department of Inorganic and Organic Chemistry, Faculty of Chemistry. The other diploma of recognition went to Carlos Femenías Ferrà, for his thesis Las razones de la forma. La obra de Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, co-supervised by Jordi Gracia and Domingo Ródenas, from the Department of Hispanic Philology, Literary Theory and Communication, Faculty of Philology and Communication.
This call received 202 submissions to the Doctors’ Senate Award, which honours doctoral theses that represent a significant contribution to the field of human knowledge and the progress of science. Many awarded studies have been recognized by the faculties’ tribunals with the extraordinary doctoral award, since these are high-quality research studies.
The UB Doctors’ Senatw was founded on 26 January 1996 with the aim of bringing together UB doctors and promoting knowledge of doctoral degrees, not only scientifically, but also socially and in the workplace. It aims to promote the University’s cultural and research activities, and to disseminate the experience and scientific and professional advances of its members. At present, the Senate has more than 1,500 members and facilitates contact between these researchers and people from different fields of knowledge who have carried out excellent work recently.
Multimedia gallery

Those distinguished by the University of Barcelona’s Doctors’ Senate have explained their research.
