This year 11 PhD students took part from the various Catalan universities, but the UIC Barcelona representative was chosen as the one who most successfully presented her thesis, winning the first prize of €3,000.

 

Anna Fosch, with the presentation Menja greixos i aprima't, el teu cervell sap com fer-ho!, (“Eat fat and lose weight, your body knows how to do it!”), sought to explain how the protein CPT1c regulates the burning of fat in our body and do so using language easily understandable for the general public.

The student, who had previously won the UIC Barcelona Doctorate School’s internal contest “Describe your thesis in 4 minutes” on 5 June, states that it was “a very rewarding and strongly recommendable.” She explains, “You learn how to sum up a huge study, and also preparing for the contest helps you be very clear about the research you are doing.”

 

This year, UIC took first place, and in the previous years of the contest Health Sciences PhD students Abril Sánchez and Reyes Carballar won third place (2018) and second place (2019) respectively.

 

Although the 2020 FCRi contest had to be held without an audience this year, it was retransmitted on YouTube, where you can also find the full recording of the whole contest.

 

The jury this year comprised Lluís Baulenas, General Secretary of the Inter-University Council of Catalonia; Martina Laporte, Quality and Regulatory Affairs Director for B. Braun; Teresa Tarragó, CEO of Exheus; Mónica Roca, First Vice-President at Barcelona Chamber of Commerce and Jordi Portabella, Director General of the Catalan Foundation for Research and Innovation (FCRi).

 

The FCRi organised the third contest of this kind together with twelve Catalan universities, with the backing of the Catalan government and support from Movistar Center.