Science World

José Pedro Cerón-Carrasco (1980) holds the European Master in Theoretical Chemistry and Computational Modeling and a Master of Science in Environmental Management and Quality Control. He earned his European PhD at the University of Murcia in Spain. He joined the University of Namur in Belgium (2009), and the University of Nantes in France (2011) during his postdoctoral stage, which was supported by Fundación Séneca and Marie Curie actions. Since July 2015, he is an Assistant Professor at the Structural Bioinformatics and High-Performance Computing Research Group (BIO-HPC) based at Universidad Católica San Antonio de Murcia (UCAM). His main research interest is the application of molecular models to the study of biosystems, including DNA and target proteins, aiming to enhance the therapeutic properties of currently available drugs. He has published more than 60 papers, most of them in the Royal Society of Chemistry and the American Chemical Society journals, e.g., Account of Chemical Research and Chemical Communications. He has contributed to more than 40 international conferences and has delivered invited seminars in centers over the world, as Université Pierre et Marie Curie in France, Saarland University in Germany and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in USA. His last research in the field of anti-viral has led to a new drug with a potent in vivo activity against ZIKA. José will be giving a keynote speech at Science World Madrid on the subject of “Molecular models applied to the drug design world: How little we know, how much to discover”.

Mariano Sigman is one of the most outstanding neuroscientists in the world, with over 150 publications in the most prestigious scientific journals. He is also passionate about experimentation and has worked with magicians, chess masters, musicians, athletes and visual artists to bring his knowledge of neuroscience to different aspects of human culture and apply it in different contexts. He has participated twice (2016 and 2017) in the TED global events in Vancouver, the second with Dan Ariely. In his conferences, he teaches how the mind works and what lessons we can learn about decision making, leadership, team management, personal development or creative skills, his presentations always with a high level of participation from the audience through experiments and games.

He obtained his degree in Physics from the University of Buenos Aires, PhD in Neuroscience (PhD) in New York and did a post-Doctorate in Cognitive Sciences at the College de France (Paris). In 2016, he was awarded the Pio XI Medal, from the Pontifical Academy of Science, one of the most outstanding prizes of science (shared amongst others with Stephen Hawking, and several Nobel prize winners).

Beyond academy, Mariano Sigman's research has had practical implications in Medicine (for example in the diagnosis of vegetative or autistic patients), in Education (with effective interventions to improve decision-making and learning in schools throughout Latin America) and in Art (in a project "The morphology of the look" that has been exhibited in New York, Austria, Moscow, Mexico, Japan... and was presented in 2017 at the Venice Biennale). He has also developed an extensive career in the proliferation of science that includes TV programmes and hundreds of articles published in different editorial media. He is also the author of the bestseller "The Secret Life of the Mind". At Science World Madrid he will be giving a keynote speech about “Neuroscience of human decisions “.