Gara Villalba, new Generalitat’s ICREA Acadèmia Award
Sostenipra researcher Gara Villalba has been granted a Research Professor position, awarded by the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA).
An ICREA Academia position aims to boost and develop research and scientific, humanistic and technological knowledge in benefit of society. Gara Villalba has been distinguished for his excellent research in the field of Engineering Science.
The Catalan Institute for Advanced Research and Studies (ICREA) announced on Friday February 12th the winners of the 2020 call of the ICREA Academia Programme, with 30 awards which aim to foster and distinguish the excellence in research conducted by public university lecturers in Catalonia, eight of whom are researchers at the UAB.
Gara Villalba is Professor of the Department of Chemical, Biological and Environmental Engineering of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Her bachelor’s degree is from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1998), and her PhD from the University of Barcelona (2003), both in chemical engineering. Her research is dedicated to the study and optimization of resource metabolism from a systemic approach based on Industrial Ecology tools such as Material Flow Analysis and Life Cycle Analysis. Recent studies focus on analyzing and optimizing the food-energy-water nexus of urban systems. She was a Marie S. Curie fellow (2015-2018) at UC Merced School of Engineering, during which she led the project URBANCO2FLUX “Quantifying the impact of the urban biosphere on the net flux of CO2 from cities into the atmosphere.” She was recently awarded an ERC Consolidator grant from Horizon 2020 of the European Commission called Integrated System Analysis of Urban Vegetation and Agriculture (2019-2024).