Carmen Agustín Pavón was born in Valencia in 1980. She graduated in Biology in 2003 with Honours (Premio Extraordinario de Licenciatura), at the University of Valencia. She earned her PhD in 2008 in the same University, with a thesis about the neurochemistry of pheromone-guided sociosexual behaviours. Her thesis was granted the Best PhD Thesis Award (Premio Extraordinario de Doctorado). She completed her pre-doctoral training with a short stay at Università di Roma La Sapienza (Sep-Dec 2006).

After her PhD, she was hired as Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Cambridge (Jan 2009- Oct 2010), where she investigated the emotional regulation in non-human primates, with a focus on the role of the prefrontal cortex. She then moved to the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona (Nov 2011- Dec 2013) as Senior Postdoctoral Researcher to work in a team developing gene therapy for Huntington’s disease. She also collaborated with other projects dealing with animal models for neurological diseases. One of these projects resulted in a paper published in Nature Medicine, which received the Award for the Best Scientific Paper from Fundación Esteve in 2013. She moved with this team to Imperial College London (Jan 2014 – Sep 2014). In October 2014, she earned a Researcher Position at University Jaume I of Castellón, where she became Lecturer at the Medical Degree in September 2015. In October 2016, she came back to University of Valencia as Lecturer. Her lab is interested in the neurobiology of social behaviour, olfactory system and Rett syndrome. 

In addition to her research activity, Carmen is devoted to science communication. She won in 2011 the El·lipse Award for Scientific Communication (Parc de Recerca Biomèdica de Barcelona) and greatly contributed to her research group winning the Award Banco Santander for Science Outreach at the University Jaume I in 2017.

She is a blogger at scientific platforms Naukas and Scilogs and she has published papers in a number of journals (Redes, Mente y Cerebro, Historia y Vida, Mètode). She has also organized or given talks at high schools, scientific cafés and other scientific communication events, such as the initiative “NeuroMascletà”, an event within the International Brain Awareness Week.

[Biography, english version]

Carles Navarro Carrascosa is Professor in the Department of Spanish Philology (Spanish Language area) at the University of Valencia. Previously, he worked as an Adjunct Professor at the same university (2016–2023) and at the Universitat Jaume I of Castelló (2021–2023), and as an Assistant Professor at the University of Valladolid (2023–2025).

He has also developed an extensive international career as a teacher and researcher: he was Academic Coordinator of the Center for Hispanic Studies (CEH) in Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) between 2012 and 2014, and Spanish language lecturer at Hacettepe University in Ankara (Turkey) between 2015 and 2016.

He is co-director of the Foro internacional de profesores de ELE/L2, así como de las revistas científicas Foro de profesores de ELE y RELEVa.

His main research areas focus on the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language (ELE), sociolinguistics, and queer linguistics, with special attention to the use of oral corpora, varieties of colloquial Spanish, and the linguistic representation of non-normative identities.

Dorota Kotwica is a lecturer at the University of Valencia. She is part of the Val.Es.Co. research group and participates in the ESPRINT research project.

Her main lines of research are pragmatics, discourse analysis, the categories of mitigation, intensification and evidentiality, and Spanish as a foreign language.