BSC researchers Rachel Lowe and Markus Donat, appointed ICREA Research Professors

04 February 2022

Two researchers from the Department of Earth Sciences at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) have been appointed ICREA Research Professors in its latest call. They are Rachel Lowe, Global Health Resilience Team Leader in the Earth System Services group and Markus Donat, co-leader of the Climate Prediction group.

Rachel Lowe’s research involves modelling the impact of environmental change on infectious disease epidemics, to inform disease control and prevention strategies. She has published high impact research on modelling climate-sensitive disease risk, with a focus on integrating seasonal climate forecasts in dengue early warning systems in the Americas and Southeast Asia. She is the Executive Director of the Lancet Countdown in Europe, a transdisciplinary collaboration tracking progress on health and climate change. In 2018, she won the International Society for Neglected Tropical Diseases (ISNTD) Water Award for Research.

Markus Donat is a climate researcher with focus on understanding and predicting how extreme climate events such as heatwaves, heavy rainfall and storms will change in the coming years and decades. This involves studying weather and climate processes that drive or amplify such extreme events, and how they are affected by climate variability and long-term climate change related to global warming. He also studies the feasibility of land-based approaches to mitigate climate change by removing and storing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and how these mitigation approaches are affected by climate-related risks. Markus received several recognitions for his research, including the World Climate Research Programme International Data Prize in 2017, and the AXA Climate Award in 2021.

About ICREA

Created in 2001, the Catalan Institu­tion for Research and Advanced Stu­dies (ICREA) is a foundation suppor­ted by the Government of Catalonia and governed by a Board of Trustees. Its aim is to promote re­search in any field of knowledge, facilitating the consolidation of collective research and the retention of talented research staff within the Catalan university and research centre system. ICREA, through a selection process based on scientific talent, hires senior scientists from around the world to work in and cooperate with local universities and research centres.