Vanguardia Science Awards

Ten years ago, the newspaper La Vanguardia, with the support of Fundació Catalunya-La Pedrera, launched the “Vanguard of Science” (La Vanguardia de la Ciencia) awards, aimed at giving visibility to frontier scientific research in Spain. The 2020 edition has recently been launched with eight selected scientific works chosen by an interdisciplinary scientific committee presented in this weekend’s edition of La Vanguardia: three in the area of biomedicine, two in astrophysics, two in material sciences- both centered on Graphene, and one in the area of biology.

ICFOnians Prof. Dmitri Efetov and Xiaobo Lu were nominated for their work entitled “Superconductors, orbital magnets and correlated states in magic-angle bilayer graphene” which was published in Nature in Fall 2019. In this study, Efetov and Lu have taken the 2018 ground-breaking MIT discovery of “magic-angle” graphene several steps further, observing a zoo of previously unobserved superconducting and correlated states, in addition to an entirely new set of magnetic and topological states. The results have opened a completely new realm of richer physics.

Over the coming weeks, readers of La Vanguardia are invited to vote for the nominee who they believe represents the most important research by scientists in Spain during 2019. The prize will be awarded based on a weighted vote; 50% based on reader’s opinion and 50% based on recommendations from the Scientific Advisory Committee.

Congratulations Dima and Xiaobo and good luck!