Who is Sandra Díaz, the Cordoba scientist who won the Princess of Asturias Award?

Cordovan Sandra Myrna Díaz, Professor at the National University of Córdoba (UNC) and Researcher at the Multidisciplinary Institute of Plant Biology (Conicet-UNC), received Wednesday the Princess of Asturias Award for Scientific and Technical Research 2019 for his work in the field.

The purpose of the Princess of Asturias Prize is to reward "the scientific, technical, cultural, social and humanitarian work done by individuals, institutions, groups of people or institutions of the international scene".

Professional profile

Díaz was born in Bell City on October 27, 1961. He obtained his degree in biology (1984) from the UNC and his Ph.D. in biological sciences from the same institution, with a thesis on "Disaster Recovery in Pastures altitude – Tillage and pastoral use ".

The author of more than 130 scientific publications is principal investigator at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (Conicet) of the Multidisciplinary Institute of Plant Biology (IMBIV) and Professor at the Ecology Chair of Communities and Ecosystems of the Faculty of the exact sciences. , Physical and Natural (UNC).

The scientist from Cordoba is part of the Academy of Sciences of the United States. She is badociate editor of the Australian magazine Southern Ecology and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Vegetation Science, the official organ of the International Association for the Science of Vegetation.

Díaz is a founding member and general scientific coordinator of DiverSus, an international network of research on biodiversity, ecosystems and sustainability, where scientists from Argentina, the United States, Bolivia, Costa Rica and the United States converge. from Brazil.

She is currently co-chair of the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

He was a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN), which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

For his work, he has received numerous awards and distinctions. In particular, he received the Ramón Margalef Prize in Ecology of the Government of Catalonia in 2017. In 2013, the price of the Houssay trajectory in the field of biological sciences was awarded by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Argentina. She also received the Konex Platinum Award in Science and Technology 2013. This year, she was elected a member of the Royal Society in 2019.

It appears in the reports "The most influential scientific minds of the world" 2014 and 2015, published by Thomson Reuters. It is a ranking drawn from an badysis of citations received by the work of scientists around the world. It is considered a way to evaluate their influence in different disciplinary areas.