José Luis Mascareñas Cid, Scientific Director of CiQUS and Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) has been awarded with the Gold Medal 2015 of the Royal Spanish Society of Chemistry (RSEQ).
The CiQUS rejoices the awarding of the Gold Medal of the RSEQ to its Scientific Director, José Luis Mascareñas. This award is the highest recognition of the scientific community in the field of chemistry in Spain.
About Prof. Mascareñas
José Luis Mascareñas completed his Degree in Chemistry in 1984, and his PhD in 1988 with Professors Antonio Mouriño and Luis Castedo at the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC). He was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University under the supervision of Professor Paul Wender (1989 and 1990) and Harvard University (1992 and 1995). Then he became Permanent Professor at the USC in 1993 and Full Professor in 2004. He has been invited teacher at the University of Cambridge (UK, 2009) and MIT (USA, 2013). He is also the founder President of the Specialized Group of Biological Chemistry RSEQ (2012) and since February 2014, Scientific Director of CiQUS (Singular Center for Research in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Materials).
El Profesor Mascareñas has published over 150 scientific papers (many of them in the best journals in the field of chemistry), 11 book chapters and filled 15 patents. To date he has supervised 25 doctoral theses and given about 100 invited lectures in some of the nest international institutions and symposia. In 2009 he was awarded the Prize for Organic Chemistry RSEQ, and the overall efforts and contributions of his group have been also internationally recognized with the concession of an ERC-Advanced Grant (2014, European Research Council - ERC).
His research program is divided in two main areas. First, the Synthesis and Catalysis programme, aimed at the discovery and development of more sustainable chemical transformations. In second place, Prof. Mascareñas has been one of the pioneers in the establishment of the Biological Chemistry in Spain, a branch of science based on the use of molecular tools to modulate or investigate biological processes. Specifically, in his group they try to design molecular systems that allow to control gene expression processes, and artificial enzymes that are capable of performing chemical reactions in living cells.
Building a school
Prof. Mascareñas has also trained a number of PhD students and postdocs, whose success is demonstrated by the fact that five members of his team have obtained Ramon y Cajal contracts, four have received Lilly Awards for PhD students, and three of them have been awarded prizes to young researchers by the RSEQ, including Dr. Mosiés Gulías, who just won this award in the 2015 call.