With this prize, the AEC recognises “his outstanding achievements to promote the transfer of knowledge and technology, as well as the creation of scientific and technological based companies, contributing to the awareness raising of the importance of this activities in Spanish researchers, in the framework of the generation of high quality employment, value and social wealth.”

Professor Manuel Pérez Alonso, President of the AEEC, collects the prize given by Inmaculada Rodríguez Mendiola, president of the Damián Rodríguez Olivares Foundation, which is aimed at promoting scientific entrepreneurship as a professional career.

The AEEC is a pioneer association, created in 2012, in the framework of the First National Congress of Scientific-Technological Entrepreneurs, which took place in the Science Park of the UV. The UV is the first institutional partner of this Association. The objective of the AEEC is to facilitate the creation of scientific and technological based companies from the research field, both public and private, to the business world. Its innovative approach and its dynamic activity, as seen in the encounters TEIBio or in the European and international projection of its conferences, have turned this association into a national reference as a promoter of a solid business and social fabric, of a scientific and technological basis. Since the First Founding Congress of 2012, there have been two more national congresses in Granada (2014) and Madrid (2015). The next National Congress will take place in Barcelona in February 2017.

Manuel Pérez Alonso, promoter of this Association, is professor in the Department of Genetics and also professor of the Chair for Business Culture of the UV. He is also the director of the Master’s Degree in Medical and Genomic Genetics of the UV and Chair Person of the BioRegión of the Valencian Community (BIOVAL). He is the scientific director of the Genomic Medicine Institute (IMEGEN) since it was created. It is located in the Science Park of the UV.