This is the third edition of this award aimed at making visible the academic and professional trajectories of women in STEM careers and expanding the base of female talent in this field.

The award went to Marta Martínez Alonso, Senior advisor at CVC Partners, who until March 2022 was General Manager of IBM for Europe, the Middle East and Africa and, previously, for eight years she was president for Spain, Portugal, Greece and Israel. The jury also awarded runner-up prizes to publicly acknowledge the professional careers of Verónica Nieves Calatrava (Universitat de València), Natalia Díaz Rodríguez (University of Granada) and Celia Perales Viejo (Fundación Jiménez Díaz).

Verónica Nieves leads the Ai4Oceans unit at the Image Processing Laboratory (IPL) of the University of Valencia, where she works with the objective of contributing to the development of the next generation of advanced algorithms intended for the analysis of Earth observation (EO) data for the assessment of the regional effects of climate change on the oceans. Her team’s work, addressing these challenges through innovative and synergistic approaches using artificial intelligence, ocean and climate sciences, will help improve understanding and predictions of climate change and its extreme effects, which threaten millions of people worldwide.

Since 2000, Verónica Nieves has made significant contributions in various priority areas in STEM, such as Oceanography, Hydroclimatology, Data Science and Remote Sensing, all supported by extensive data analysis. Her work, both in Spain and at leading US institutions – University of California Irvine, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Los Angeles – has driven advances in the treatment of complex variables and has generated knowledge for understanding climate at a local and global level. In addition, she has developed fundamental tools to interpret the physics underlying particular climate phenomena, such as global warming, sea level rise, hurricane intensification, and extreme wind events. All this, supported by data analysis and AI techniques.

The IPL scientist now recognized by the iDanae Chair is a member of the scientific advisory board of the EU Copernicus Marine Service. She was previously a member of the NASA Sea Level Change Team and the Group of Experts of the United Nations Regular Process for the Global Ocean Assessment. She has also served on the scientific panel committee of US CLIVAR, US National Academy of Sciences and US Department of Energy in various capacities.

The iDanae Chair (intelligence, data, analysis and strategy) in Big Data and Analytics was born from the collaboration between the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM) and the international firm Management Solutions. The awards ceremony will take place this Tuesday, November 28 in Madrid, in an event organised with the collaboration of the Royal Academy of Sciences (RAC).