Marta Sales Pardo is the first woman from a Catalan and Spanish university to have been appointed as a fellow member by this scientific society.

Senior lecturer at the URV’s Department of Chemical Engineering, Marta Sales-Pardo has been chosen as a fellow member by the Network Science Society (NetSci) “for her contributions to the understanding of the organisation of large-scale networks and the development of generative models and inference methodologies for complex networks”. This scientific society recognises a maximum of seven research specialists every year who have made leading contributions to the field of complex networks and the network research community. She is the first woman from a Catalan university (and from the whole of Spain) to have received this honour.

The researcher graduated in Physics from the University of Barcelona where she also completed her doctorate in Statistical Physics. Subsequently she was awarded a Fullbright grant to attend the Northwestern University (USA), where she started her work on complex networks: “I was interested in seeing how we could extract information from large amounts of data that could be represented in the form of networks and find a way of representing these networks in summarised form”, explain.

In 2009, she started work as senior lecturer at the URV where she set up the Science and Engineering of Emergent Systems Lab with the ICREA URV researcher Roger Guimerà. In recent years, she has focused particularly on developing methodologies based on bayesian inference for analysing and predicting data. Her studies are a point of reference in the world of networks, and she has published in such influential journals as Science, Science Advances, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Physical Review X.