ICTA-UAB Best Prizes awarded to female postdoctoral researchers 

The award recognises works carried out by a postdoctoral researcher or with a central gender focus or feminist epistemology.

The prizes, presented during the Welcome Event for new members of the ICTA-UAB community, recognised the Best Scientific Article and the Best Doctoral Thesis of 2023, both works carried out by a postdoctoral researcher or with a central gender focus or feminist epistemology. Two internal committees of researchers reviewed the applications and selected the winner for each category.  

Researcher Soledad Castro, who is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich (Switzerland), was awarded for the Best Doctoral Thesis Award 2023.

Her thesis "Plantations, pesticides, and the State: The making and unmaking of the Térraba-Sierpe delta" studies the impacts of the intersection between pesticides and plantations in waterscapes from Costa Rica, on both social and ecological systems. Soledad’s research is highly grounded in empirical analysis, bringing new evidence from primary data.

According to the verdict of the jury, composed of Sara Maestre, Sandrine Gallois and Umberto Lombardo, her research is not only strongly interdisciplinary, combining theoretical and methodological frameworks from both social and environmental sciences (political ecology and ecotoxicology), but also engages in critical reflexivity.

Additionally, Soledad has demonstrated her capacity to engage with both scientific and artistic languages to create not only an excellent scientific contribution but also an appealing and inspiring thesis. For all these reasons, they considered that Soledad stands out as embodying the criteria for this prize most effectively.

The jury emphasised the high quality of the theses, as well as the originality of the research, the rigor of the design and methods and the quality of the results, which are comparable for all the theses. In the assessment, they also considered other factors such as whether the research was conducted in a historically male-dominated field, the gender lenses taken by the research and the social impacts for women and gender issues in general.

Dannieli Herbst was the winner of the Best Postdoctoral Published Paper published in 2023, with the article 180 years of marine animal diversity as perceived by public media in southern Brazil, published in the journal PLOS ONE.

According to the jury, composed of Roberto Cantoni, Oriol Marquet and Patrizia Ziveri, the paper has a novel approach and is relevant to scientists and policymakers, and has enjoyed good media coverage. The jury noted that it is interesting both in its approach and methods, and that it includes a historical analysis of journalistic publications on a topic that is usually investigated through other investigation means and as such is original.