Carolina Belenguer wins the Francisca Lorente Solaz Award for young female researchers in the field of Chemistry

The award recognises the academic and investigative trajectory of women trained in the field of chemistry at the University of Valencia. The conditions for qualification state that participants must have graduated with a bachelor’s degree after 2012, have earned a doctorate degree from the UV in the field of chemistry, and be under 30 years of age.

Carolina Belenguer holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Chemistry from the UV and two master’s degrees, one from the UV and the other from the CEU-Cardenal Herrera. Since 2022, she has also held a Doctorate in Chemistry from the University of Valencia.

She won a scholarship (Talent Agency - VLC Campus) in the Department of Analytical Chemistry in order to carry out her doctoral thesis and also completed a research stay for the Organic Chemistry Institute and Centre for Soft nanoscience at the University of Münster, Alemania. She is the author of more than 20 research publications in a variety of reputable international journals in the field of Analytical Chemistry and author of numerous communications to congresses. She has taught in the Department of Analytical Chemistry and has participated in several projects for innovation in teaching and diffusion of chemistry. She also developed, together with other authors, the educational card game, ‘Valencias, Juega y Formula’ (‘Valencia, Play and Formulate’) published by the Publications Service (PUV) of the University of Valencia in 2019. She has also worked in various laboratories, both public and private, and currently works as interim official of the Burjassot Agro-Food Laboratory (Valencian Regional Government) in quality control and food safety.

The award is named after Francisca Lorente Solaz (Valencia, 1891-1981), the first woman to earn a degree in any of the Sciences, but specifically Chemistry, from the University of Valencia, in 1917. From 1920 to 1922, she worked in the Physics Research Laboratory, created in Madrid in 1910 by the Board of the Expansion of Studies. Her research was centred on electro-chemistry and electro-analysis, under the direction of Enrique Moles and Carmen Pradel. In 1931, she worked as a professor in the municipal laboratory of Chemical Sciences in Valencia, lead by Vicente Candela Ortells, and from 1932 she worked as a pharmacist on Avenida del Puerto (Port Avenue) here in Valencia.