Full professor at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and researcher at the Centre de Recerca Matemàtica, Jezabel Curbelo has been honored with the 2025 National Research Award for Young Researchers in the María Andresa Casamayor category (Mathematics and ICT). The prize highlights her work in fluid dynamics applied to geophysics.
Jezabel Curbelo, full professor at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) and researcher affiliated with the Centre de Recerca Matemàtica (CRM), has been awarded the 2025 National Research Award for Young Researchers in the category María Andresa Casamayor (Mathematics and Information and Communication Technologies). These awards, granted by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (MICIU), recognise researchers under the age of 40 who have achieved outstanding contributions in the early stages of their careers. Each award is endowed with 30,000 euros and covers ten different areas.
For Curbelo, the recognition comes at a key point in her trajectory: “It is a great joy! It is an honour to see the work carried out over these years recognised, and also a source of motivation to keep moving forward and looking for new challenges.” Her research focuses on fluid dynamics applied to geophysics, particularly on the simulation and modeling of complex processes in the atmosphere, the ocean, and the Earth’s interior. She is currently leading projects that seek new ways to understand climate change, such as the Ramón Areces Foundation-funded project CLaCos – Deciphering Climate Change, and developing techniques based on particle trajectories to study geophysical fluid systems: “Right now I am working on several projects, on the one hand, deciphering climate change, and on the other, applying a dynamical perspective to study different geophysical fluid systems using various techniques based on particle trajectories and spectral clustering methods of these trajectories.”
“Applied mathematics is a very powerful tool to provide solutions to problems that have a great impact on everyday life.”
Her academic career has taken her through leading international centers and universities such as ICMAT in Madrid, UCLA in the United States, and the Laboratoire de Géologie de Lyon, before joining UPC and CRM. She emphasises the profound impact of these experiences on her scientific approach: “They have completely shaped my way of doing science and have been key to my training and development. I would not be here answering this interview or have received this award if it weren’t for all the people I have had the good fortune to work with.”
Beyond scientific results, Curbelo highlights the social importance of applied mathematics: “I would like people to understand that applied mathematics is a very powerful tool to provide solutions to problems that have a great impact on everyday life. Moreover, it is not a solitary job: doing research in applied mathematics means collaborating with physicists, engineers, oceanographers… and this joint effort allows us to address questions that would be very difficult, or impossible, to solve separately.”
With this recognition, Jezabel Curbelo strengthens her position as one of the leading voices in applied mathematics in Spain. The CRM warmly congratulates Jezabel on this award.
Jezabel Curbelo is a full professor at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). Previously, she was a “Ramón y Cajal” research fellow at the UPC (July 2020–June 2025), Visiting Assistant Researcher in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles (2019 and 2020), and Assistant Professor (“Profesor Ayudante Doctor”, 2016–2020) in the Department of Mathematics at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
She also held postdoctoral positions as a LabEX LIO fellow at the Laboratoire de Géologie de Lyon: Terre, Planètes, Environnement (CNRS, ENS, Lyon 1), and as a Juan de la Cierva Formación postdoc at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Aeronáutica y del Espacio of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. She began her academic career as a PhD student in the JAE-Predoc program at the Instituto de Ciencias Matemáticas (ICMAT), where she also worked as a teaching assistant (2012–2014).
She co-organizes the UB-UPC Dynamical Systems Seminar. She serves as an editor for Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics and The EMS Magazine (European Mathematical Society), and is Early Career Editor for Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena.
Currently, she is Deputy Director of Research in the Department of Mathematics at the UPC and Science Officer of NP6: Turbulence, Transport and Diffusion in the Nonlinear Processes in Geoscience division of the European Geosciences Union.
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CRM CommPau Varela
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