The research group GIDOP (Optimal Development Research Group) has its origins in two research groups of the Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology of the Universitat de València and was created with the aim of combining efforts and resources in related lines of work.
On the one hand, the GIOE (Research Group in Evolutionary Optimisation) created in 2001 is a multidisciplinary group whose strategic philosophy is the optimisation of human development from a contextual perspective with an emphasis on applied research. The work is applied developmental psychology combines a developmental and community approach and is guided by the values of participation, social justice, collaboration of the groups involved and personal and community empowerment.
On the other hand, the Affective Attachments Research Group, also created in 2001, studies affective attachments: their formation, their development, their loss, and their implications in different areas of development. Its interest lies in the analysis of the most significant bonds throughout life: the parent-child bond, infant attachment and bonds after infancy: adolescent attachment, adult attachment, friendship, couple relationship, etc.
Our research group has extensive experience in research projects funded both by national and international public bodies and by contracts with companies, institutions and social entities. It has also published numerous scientific publications in the form of books, articles and contributions to conferences. The participation of team members in the design and implementation of training courses requested by different entities is very relevant.
Finally, an area of special interest since our origins has been the transfer of knowledge through coordinated community-university work that has allowed the continuous application of actions with theoretical and methodological rigour in schools, town councils and social entities.
Our central focus is on evolutionary optimisation by promoting optimal development throughout life. At present, GIDOP's research activity is structured into six main lines of research that study optimal development and emphasise all those areas that have a major impact on development. Specifically, we work on perinatal development; the exercise of parenthood and its implications; development in adolescence, a crucial stage in the construction of personal identity; affective bonds throughout life, including the main important relationships in our development; the development of personal, emotional and social competencies to promote strengths and reduce possible limitations; and finally, the development of tolerance and the promotion of coexistence, a line that has yielded important results in recent years.
The main objectives of the research group are:
- To advance the conceptualisation of optimal development at all stages of life.
- To study in depth methods and strategies to optimise development and promote well-being and health.
- To develop and validate instruments for the evaluation and diagnosis of the psychological variables worked on.
- To work in the field of applied developmental psychology, facilitating the optimal development and well-being of individuals.
- To offer services and interventions to public and private entities with the aim of increasing potentials and strengths, as well as decreasing personal and social limitations.
Our research group works on prediction and optimisation techniques. Prediction of future observations and optimisation in order to build automatic decision support tools in an uncertain environment. This has already led to interesting results, especially in the fields of medicine and public health, but also in industry and finance. Consequently, our purpose is twofold: to deepen the study of prediction models that can incorporate temporal and/or spatial relationships, as well as covariates, and to continue advancing in the development of methodologies that incorporate uncertainty in optimisation, which will allow us to build new tools to support decision-making in different areas of planning and management. In particular, we will investigate the analysis of scenarios with the presence of uncertainty for which there is information given by a series of historical data, for which we will use time series models, and those in which in addition to the temporal relationship there is a neighbourhood relationship between contemporaneous observations, for which we will use spatio-temporal models. Previous work have considered prediction models based on dynamic state-space models with innovations, and have advanced theoretically in the incorporation of multistationarity, covariates and autocorrelated errors, with the aim that they can be used in the automatic prediction of banks of time series. Recently, we have introduced fuzzy time series methods to obtain as a prediction a fuzzy number that can be incorporated into optimisation models using fuzzy logic to incorporate uncertainty. Our aim is to extend the field of application of these methodologies by means of simulation-optimisation models that make it possible to analyse the quality of the solutions and the optimisation of the objectives. We are also working on compositional time series, which allow us to contextualise mixed models for multivariate longitudinal compositional data in a microbiome setting.
Recently, we have been working on the combination of forecasts, using weighted averages of forecasts obtained with different methods, with the aim of designing a decision support system that allows the adjustment of weights and the optimal selection of prediction models to obtain more reliable forecasts. The study of the geographical and temporal variability of health phenomena is currently very popular in the world of epidemiology. Numerous risk smoothing models that simultaneously incorporate the spatial dependence of risks between nearby regions and the temporal dependence of risks for each of the regions have been proposed in recent years. Classical models have been designed for retrospective analysis of incidence time series and therefore do not address fundamental issues from the point of view of planning preventive and control actions such as predicting the onset of outbreaks, predicting epidemic peaks and ending epidemics. We want to analyse some problems related to the prediction of the spread of epidemics, focusing simultaneously on the spatial and temporal components of the problem. Along the same lines, simultaneous incorporation of temporal and spatial components in the models studied, we are working on various scenarios: Bayesian hierarchical model extension, recently proposed by members of our team, which allows estimating risks and detecting clusters simultaneously where it is considered that the spatial dependence between relative risks does not necessarily conform to neighbourhood criteria; spatio-temporal extension of Bayesian stochastic compartment models; proposal of a spatio-temporal model for the treatment of epidemiological data in the compositional scenario, and proposal of a spatio-temporal model for the analysis of associations between environmental exposures and health. All these prediction results will be used in the construction of decision support systems based on optimisation models under uncertainty for different domains. Among them, in addition to the areas mentioned above, we will work on financial management problems, in particular the problem of portfolio selection. The portfolio selection problem is about determining an optimal portfolio that satisfies the decision-maker's preferences, in terms of risk and return on investment. We have introduced the approximation of portfolio performance by credibility distributions and alternative measures of investment risk. We will address the portfolio selection problem by introducing a loss function that can be visualised by the investor as a measure of his preferences and develop evolutionary multi-objective optimisation strategies to determine efficient portfolios for different investor risk profiles.
This is a research group working within the analytic tradition broadly conceived that is the product of the association of two Research Groups: Phronesis and Méthodos. Like other groups in Continental Europe, we focus on central issues in the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy and methodology of science, logic, metaphysics and epistemology, but are also interested in ethics and aesthetics. One of our aims is to cultivate the kind of clear and rigorous research that is specific of analytic philosophy in fields traditionally reserved, in our institutional context, to continental approaches. We promote the interaction with other philosophers and groups within the analytic tradition.
The activity is based on the study of the application of current territorial legal systems and the problematic of procedures, both from the revenue and expenditure side.
- Law 34/2015 substantially modified all the titles of the General Tax Law, applicable to the Local Treasury. Currently pending approval are the Royal Decrees amending all the Regulations implementing the LGT. Likewise, the new Laws 39/2015 and 40/2015 on Common Administrative Procedure and the Legal Regime of Public Administrations require significant changes to be made to the framework of action of Local Bodies in their relations with citizens, which also affect the tax sphere.
- In recent years, the volume of conflict in relation to local taxes has increased notably, in different dimensions:
- correspondence of the Tax Ordinances to the Constitution, LGT and the LHL.
- procedures for the drafting and approval of said Ordinances.
- acts of local tax management
- The tax control and debt recovery strategies of the regional and local tax authorities are far removed from those designed and successfully implemented by the Tax Agency at the national level.
- On the other hand, at this time of climate change, it is necessary to develop research applied to various simultaneous objectives: combining tourism promotion with sustainable development that preserves the environment as an intrinsic value, the search for new municipal financing formulas that pursue the aforementioned aims and an increase in the financial sufficiency of Local Corporations in covering the cost of services. In Spain there are still few pioneering experiences in this direction, but in the comparative sphere it is possible to look at the solutions applied in environments with similar geographical and tourist singularities. The aim is to project the potential of taxes as fundamental mechanisms to advance in two directions:
- on the one hand, overcoming the endemic scenarios of financial insufficiency of Local Corporations;
- on the other, the suitability of local public action, as the level of government closest to the citizen and on which the objective of safeguarding and improving the idiosyncrasy and values of the municipality operates at the forefront.
- Finally, equality between men and women as well as transparency and good governance must be taken into account when complying with the requirement of fairness in public spending. It is therefore necessary to analyse and propose the general regulatory framework for participatory budgeting and gender budgeting. Indeed, the linking of public spending to objective principles of material justice is an unavoidable requirement. The principle of justice in public spending becomes the material substratum of the obligation of all Public Administrations to draw up their budgets with a gender perspective, since it must be clear that in order to achieve equality, the material justice proclaimed in the Constitution, budgets must be drawn up with a gender perspective, which in no way implies allocating more resources to programmes or actions aimed at women, but only a different way of analysing and drawing up traditional budgets, an action which underlies the achievement of objectives of economic effectiveness and efficiency. But it is not only the public expenditure side, both public income and expenditure, which must be analysed from a gender perspective in order to achieve the financial justice to which they must be directed by constitutional mandate.
Study of finite groups and their representations, the interaction between the types of conjugation and structure, as well as on global/local problems. The Group Theory is the symmetry theory for Mathematics and physical systems with essential connections with Physics, Chemistry and the information theory or cryptography.
Deteriorating environmental conditions, mainly caused by human activities, are a major health risk. Pollution, environmental degradation, deforestation and biodiversity loss are not only affecting ecosystems and climate, but also have serious consequences on the production of safe and quality food and on the population.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the safety of the food we consume and the environment where we live in has become a top priority for consumers and public authorities alike. The Research Group on Food and Environmental Safety (SAMA-UV) is dedicated to research in environmental and food sciences and provides state-of-the-art technology and analytical services for the determination of contaminants and natural compounds, focusing its activities in the areas of environmental health, food quality and safety as well as risk assessment and human exposure studies. The pollutants with which the research group works and for which it has advanced analytical methodology include both regulated and emerging pollutants and their degradation products (ex. pesticides, drugs of abuse, human and veterinarian medicines, perfluorinated compounds, flame retardants, etc…).
The results of this activity has enabled the research group to interact and collaborate with other national and European teams researching similar topics through the attendance and paper presentation at numerous international meetings and conferences and articles in scientific journals. As a whole, the research activity carried out has generated 15 book chapters and more than 180 publications in international CSI journals with a high impact rate such as Analytical Chemistry, TrAC Trends in Analytical Chemistry, Journal of Chromatography, Analytica Chimica Acta, Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, Food Chemistry, Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, etc.
The group’s research is mainly funded through research projects within the framework of grants for R&D projects at both regional and national level, and also within the framework of various integrated actions with the cooperation of other research groups in the European Union. The group also has collaborations and agreements with companies in the food and environmental sector.
The research group develops its research activity focused on scientific communication in three areas.
The first one is related to scientific communication from a historical point of view. In particular, it focuses on the circulation of ideas and books between Spain and Europe during the 18th century through the reconstruction of the libraries of the Valencian erudites. These libraries not only give us information about the owner of the library and their readings, but also about the processes of cultural and scientific transfer at that time. The reconstruction of the catalogues of these libraries is fundamental to understand the entry of ideas, authors and books of marked modernity in Spain, in fields such as History, Philosophy, Science and Humanities, among others. It also allows us to reconstruct the channels of circulation of books and their main protagonists: printers, booksellers, intermediaries and customs agents, who anonymously made it possible for international scientific mainstreams to enter Spain.
The second area has to do with the practices that shape current science, both from the institutional point of view and from the perspective of scientists. Thus, this group works on the assessment of research developed and/or financed by specific public institutions by obtaining bibliometric indicators related to production, scientific collaboration and research impact. This has materialised in recent years in the implementation of various research contracts signed with academic institutions and public administration bodies. In addition, from the point of view of national research policies, patterns of scientific communication are studied, both from a quantitative and qualitative standpoint, in the context of a new communication model determined by the increasing use of social media and the Open Access to science movement. From the researcher’s point of view, this implies the requirement to disseminate the results of their publicly funded research through systems that ensure open access to this information. For this reason, it is also necessary to evaluate compliance with these mandates, designing the most appropriate procedures for this purpose. These procedures are designed on the basis of a study of the editorial policy of the journals through which the results of publicly funded research are disseminated, as well as by investigating the behaviour of researchers with respect to scientific communication and the characteristics that may favour the adoption of this innovation.
Finally, the third research area of this group is the new challenges facing academic and research institutions and scientists themselves. Specifically, it is the management of research data, which is a new step in the OA movement in which access to research data is promoted in order to favour the good management of public investment, create value chains in the field of innovation and increase international cooperation, among others. In this context, this group maintains a stable collaboration with various European research groups focused on the study of researchers' data literacy. The aim is to diagnose and then promote a culture that favours open access to data among the academic and research community.
This research group is interested in the analysis of human movement related to motor control and physical activity from a health perspective. Therefore, its interest is focused both on the dynamic, kinematic and electromyographic analysis during the performance of activities such as static balance and gait and the analysis of the amount of physical activity (voluntary movement) performed by people and the relationship of this with their health. On the other hand, the group also conducts research in other areas related to physical exercise, applying advanced data analysis techniques (e.g. neural networks, text mining, data mining). During the last 5 years the research group has published around 40 articles indexed in JCR, of which we highlight the following 5 for their importance in the opinion of the members of the group:
- González, L.-M., García-Massó, X., Pardo-Ibañez, A., Peset, F., & Devís-Devís, J. (2018). An author keyword analysis for mapping Sport Sciences. PLOS ONE, 13(8), e0201435. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0201435
- García-Massó, X., Ye-Lin, Y., Garcia-Casado, J., Querol, F., & Gonzalez, L.-M. (2019). Assessment of haemophilic arthropathy through balance analysis: A promising tool. Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering, 22(4), 418-425. https://doi.org/10.1080/10255842.2018.1561877
- González, L.-M., Devís-Devís, J., Pellicer-Chenoll, M., Pans, M., Pardo-Ibañez, A., García-Massó, X., Peset, F., Garzón-Farinós, F., & Pérez-Samaniego, V. (2021). The Impact of COVID-19 on Sport in Twitter: A Quantitative and Qualitative Content Analysis. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(9), 4554. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18094554
- Maitre, J., Noé, F., González, L.-M., García-Massó, X., & Paillard, T. (2021). The tightening parameters of the vibratory devices modify their disturbing postural effects. Journal of Biomechanics, 126, 110624. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbiomech.2021.110624
- Pellicer-Chenoll, M., Pans, M., Seifert, R., López-Cañada, E., García-Massó, X., Devís-Devís, J., & González, L.-M. (2021). Gender differences in bicycle sharing system usage in the city of Valencia. Sustainable Cities and Society, 65, 102556. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2020.102556
Fundamental studies and development of analytical applications in liquid chromatography in all modalities (conventional, capillary and nano), electrophoresis and capillary electrochromatography and mass spectrometry. Studies on high-temperature chromatography. Development of new stationary phases with and without nanoparticles through chromatography, capillary electrochromatography and for pre-concentration in capillary electrophoresis. Fundamental studies on the design and manufacture of new monolithic stationary phases. Methods of analysis of industrial products: cleaning products, cosmetics, vegetable oils and others. Methods of analysis of industrial waste in the aquatic environment. Methods of analysis of chiral pharmaceutical compounds. Methods of analysis of biological samples.
This research group focuses on the study of the characteristics, structure, processes and incentive systems of the management bodies of companies, and their relationship with the strategies they use, as well as with the results of the organisations.
The research team that makes up this group specialises in competitive and corporate strategy, as well as in the approaches of top management teams (Upper Echelons), Corporate Governance, and sustainable competitiveness (i.e. the balance between competitiveness, survival and Corporate Social Responsibility in a broad sense).
In the field of strategy, this research group has carried out multiple research projects on competitive strategy (strategy clock and competitive positioning), strategic orientation of organisations, internationalisation strategies, diversification strategies, entry modes, mergers and acquisitions, strategic alliances, etc. These works have been published in both national and international academic journals, with considerable weight being given to those in the main international lists of research journals (i.e. JCR, Scopus, etc.).
Since 2002, much of this work has focused on the fundamental role of management teams and governing bodies in defining strategies and in the disposition of certain attitudes that are reflected in strategic decision-making. Market orientation, proactive, innovative and risk-taking orientation, open-mindedness, acceptance of change, self-confidence, optimism, complacency, globally responsible attitudes, ethics or personalistic and particularistic approaches are areas of interest in the research.
Among the aspects considered in relation to management teams and governing bodies, this research group pays attention to team composition, diversity, power and participation structure, hierarchical and horizontal role distribution, interaction processes, cognitive and affective conflict, shared values, incentive systems, as well as demographic and psycho-sociological characteristics of specific members of executvie management, such as General Management or certain functional or divisional managers.
Both antecedents and consequences of the above-mentioned variables and the relationships between them are of interest to us. With regard to the effects of these relationships on organisational performance, attention is paid to aspects such as competitiveness (profitability, growth, solvency, survival), reputation, value creation, etc.
Our research is mainly carried out through the execution of competitive research projects, financed by the Generalitat Valenciana (Valencian Government) and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, among others. However, this research group maintains close contact with the economic-business context, and carries out technical advice, training, diagnosis and technical studies and reports aimed at the practical application of our line of work.
The fundamentally basic research activity of the ParaSalut group covers different aspects of the relationship between health and parasites, in both humans and animals carrying parasitic diseases or their models. The group presents lines of work on parasitic diseases caused by Protozoa, as well as Helminths and Arthropods. All the lines are already in progress and have numerous publications, as shown on the group members’ resumes.
Protozoa: One of the group’s research lines focuses on the influence of intestinal parasites (mainly protozoa) on human nutrition, given that said parasites interfere directly or indirectly with the nutrient absorption processes, maldigestion and / or malabsorption. Therefore, this line consists of two main objectives: 1) study on the relationship between intestinal parasites and food intolerances to carbohydrates, and 2) studies on the relationship between intestinal parasites and mother-child nutrition, as well as the analysis of the nutritional status of mothers and children and the effect of parasitosis on child development.
Helminths: Different aspects of helminthic diseases are addressed with a focus on epidemiology, ecology and parasite-host relationships.
Epidemiology / ecology: There are two lines addressing aspects on epidemiology and ecology of diseases caused by helminths. One of them analyses the study on biological cycles, transmission and population dynamic of helminths in murine models that have shown to be good bio-indicators of the parasite-host relationship. These studies are complemented by the line working on the creation of Geographical Information Systems with the use of satellite images and thematic maps for epidemiology modelling and the transmission of human and animal parasites, and the influence of climate change on them. Likewise, studies on food-transmitted parasitic diseases are addressed in another line in which the study of anisakiasis in fish for human consumption represents its basic pillar.
Parasite-host relationships: the establishment of a parasitic disease results from the parasite succeeding over the host. The analysis for the established relationships between both are fundamental to know the factors said establishment depends on, thus enabling the implementation of adequate preventive measures. Likewise, the specificity of this relationship is a tool for the improvement of current diagnostic methods. In these parasite-host relationships, extracellular vesicles (EVs) have lately proved to be a valuable instrument for these purposes.
The ParaSalud group develops a line on the study of EVs in different helminths of human and veterinary interest. Said EVs are isolated and characterised by their composition (proteins, miRNAs) and their use as target molecules for diagnosis, treatment and / or vaccination is experimentally evaluated. This previously undertaken research line is reinforced by other lines from the group working on the study of parasite-host relationships by techniques generally referred to as “omics”, including genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics.
The line on human Taeniasis / Cisticerosis is part of both aspects: epidemiological studies of materials from different countries, and ultrastructural as well as secretomics studies of the infective form of human cisticerosis, the egg.
Arthropods: Equally important are ectoparasite arthropods, considering that in addition to being vectors of parasitic diseases, they have their own pathogenic potential. The Medical Entomology line carries out the diagnosis and epidemiologic analysis of mosquitos populations, lice, bedbugs and myisis cases.
The area of work of this group is demographic studies aimed at the Valencian population. This group investigates classic demographic phenomena such as birth rates, fertility, marriage and the formation and dissolution of unions, ageing, morbidity, reproduction and migrations with special interest in their evolution from the existence of the first modern demographic sources to the present day and including projections of future developments. These studies focus on the population located in the Valencian territory, looking to locate it in the territorial breakdowns that go from the census section, the smaller entities, the municipalities and the counties.
In addition, this group carries out research on life trajectories or life courses. The life course perspective is applied to study life processes such as, for example, emancipation, entry into adulthood, training and work episodes, maternity-paternity or retirement. The analysis of life course trajectories takes into account temporal dimensions such as age, generation and time, gender and social class, origin and language. The object of study is also specific populations whose socio-demographic characteristics and social importance in the structure and change of Valencian society require specific analyses. Specifically, populations in situations of social vulnerability from a multidimensional perspective.
The group combines the production of data on population through the design of demographic surveys, the cataloguing of existing secondary data on the Valencian population (registers and population stocks from survey data), the cultivation of statistical modelling techniques, the calculation of indicators, the collection of discourses on life events and trajectories.
Both for the information it collects and for the analysis it carries out, DEMOVAL provides the business fabric, the administration at all levels and the third sector with valuable knowledge of the demographic, cultural and social characteristics, forecasts, diagnoses, situation in the territory, etc., related to the Valencian population. With all this, DEMOVAL potentially represents a substantial improvement in market studies, public policies, and social actions and interventions.
