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Credit: BBVA FOUNDATION
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Ecology and Conservation Biology category has gone in this thirteenth edition to ecologists Sandra Díaz (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina, and Argentine National Research Council, CONICET), Sandra Lavorel (Laboratoire d Ecologie Alpine [LECA], Grenoble, France, and Landcare Research, Lincoln, New Zealand) and Mark Westoby (Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia), for expanding the concept of biodiversity, through their pioneering work to discover, describe and coordinate the measurement of plant functional traits.
Independently and collaboratively, the awardees focused their research on arranging each plant s ecosystem function along dimensions of measurable physical traits, such as height, leaf type or seed size, enabling them to locate patterns in the functional diversity of species at a global level. The catalogue of these functional traits has now become a vast database,
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Genova/Lecce (Italy), 28th January 2021 - Understanding and treating brain disorders, such as Alzheimer s disease, addiction, chronic pain, depression and schizophrenia, entails the comprehension of the alterations that may occur in the deep regions of the gray matter. Thanks to the European-funded project DEEPER, an international research consortium, coordinated by IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology), will develop new photonic technologies to access those regions and reveal the molecular and cellular dysfunctions underlying the origin of the disorder. The new technological tools are developed with the goal to directly treat the diseases in a minimally invasive and highly effective way. DEEPER will transfer the technological results from laboratory to market, with the ambition to have an impact to strengthen Europe s industrial position in the biophotonics market.