Brasília – Brazilian physicist, Márcia Barbosa, has been awarded the L'Oréal Foundation-UNESCO Women in Science prize for Latin America. The award cites five research projects by Barbosa that have contributed to scientific progress in general, saying that each was characterized by a very high level of excellence.
Barbosa is a professor at, and the director of, the Physics Institute at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. Her most important work, according to UNESCO, was the discovery of a unique peculiarity of water molecules (“anomalia de difusão”) that helps explain a vast range of events in nature. Water is so abundant, she says, that people do not pay attention to it - but it has anomalies that have enormous significance and influence in many natural occurrences, from earthquakes to disease.
This is the fourth time a Brazilian women scientist has received this award (the others were: Mayana Zatz, geneticist at Universidade de São Paulo (USP), in 2001; Lucia Previato, biomedicine at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), in 2004; Belita Koiller, physicist at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), in 2005; and astrophysicist Beatriz Barbuy, at Universidade de São Paulo (USP), in 2009).
Over the last 15 years (the award was created in 1998), out of the 77 UNESCO Women in Science award winners, two, Ada Yonath (chemistry) and Elizabeth Blackburn (medicne) have won Nobel Prizes.
Allen Bennett – translator/editor The News in English
Link - Cientista brasileira é premiada pela Unesco por trabalho com moléculas de água
