De Copas con Ciencia: Raquel Pérez & José Luis Cebollada
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of Medicines and mathematical experiments this month in “De Copas Con Ciencia”.
This Thursday, 24 November, a new session of the successful project “De Copas Con Ciencia” will take place. An initiative that aims to satisfy the scientific curiosity of the population in a relaxed, entertaining and fun way during leisure time, bringing it to the bars. The activity is aimed at anyone with a scientific curiosity, without the need for specific training in science, and aims to be a meeting point for science lovers in order to facilitate the creation of scientific debates between experts and the general public.
The activity is organised by the research institutes, SQCH (Instituto de Síntesis Química y Catálisis Homogénea) e INMA (Instituto de Nanociencia y Materiales de Aragón), both joint centres CSIC – University of Zaragoza, and will be repeated periodically on the last Thursday of each month. During these sessions, topics related to chemistry, nanotechnology and materials science will be discussed.
The second session of the season, with free admission, will take place on the 24th of November at 20:00 in El Sótano Mágico, Calle San Pablo 43, Zaragoza and will feature Raquel Pérez Herrera and José Luis Cebollada.
– The Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of Medicines” Raquel Pérez-Herrera (Institute of Chemical Synthesis and Homogeneous Catalysis, ISQCH, (CSIC-UNIZAR))
It is well known that the biological properties of many compounds depend on their enantiomeric form. Since the tragic consequences of the administration of thalidomide to pregnant women in the 1960s, a clear example of this statement, the demand for enantiomerically pure compounds by the pharmaceutical industry has grown significantly.
Raquel Pérez-Herrera is a CSIC Research Scientist at the ISQCH, CSIC-University of Zaragoza and heads the Asymmetric Organocatalysis group. In 2012, at the age of 35, she was the winner of the 2012 Lilly Prize, which is awarded in our country to the best young scientist under 40 in the field of organic chemistry. She has presented her work in more than 150 contributions to national and international conferences. She is currently the author of 115 research papers in high-level international journals and has an H index = 35. She has participated in numerous research projects (42), being the PI of 10 of them. She is also the supervisor of 5 doctoral theses that have already been defended and is currently supervising the work of 7 more.
– “Science Told.” – José Luis Cebollada Gracia. Secondary school teacher, currently retired
We already know that mathematics (and mathematicians too) are used to calculate how much we each touch when they bring the bill at the restaurant. But they are not only useful for that: they help us to understand why drops of water or the Earth are almost spherical; the relationship between the shape of the water in a hosepipe and ice cream cones or why it is hotter in summer than in winter. A very personal tasting menu on the mathematics of science with live experiments and, as Les Luthiers would say: ‘everything because you laugh’.
José Luis Cebollada Gracia, currently a pensioner, graduated in Chemistry from the University of Zaragoza in 1986. He was a secondary school teacher for more than 30 years in different secondary schools in Aragon – the last 12 years at the IES La Azucarera in Zaragoza. Between 2009 and 2020 he participated in the coordination of the Ciencia Viva programme of the Department of Education, which organised science outreach and extracurricular activities for primary and secondary schools in collaboration with many Aragonese research centres, and in recent years he has focused on the experimental side of science.
Since 2021, it has been collaborating in the Faraday Project, part of the non-profit association AADRYPE, which aims to bring science workshops for all audiences to small towns in Aragon where there are not many scientific leisure activities.
In addition, during the session there will be a face-to-face competition Hi Score Science, aimed at the general public, which will reward the scientific knowledge acquired by those attending the session.
Hi Score Science is a game of questions and answers about science, in Spanish and English, for mobile devices, iOS and Android that is developed between the two research institutes, the ISQCH and INMA, which allows to include explanations of the scientific reality behind each of the answers. The game can be downloaded free of charge and without advertising in the Apple Store and Play Store and for Windows, iOS and Linux at www.HiScoreScience.org. The application also allows users to participate in the project by sending us their own questions via a dedicated website www.hiscorescience.org.
