Jezabel Curbelo receives the 2026 ECCOMAS Jacques-Louis Lions Award

The European Community on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences (ECCOMAS) has awarded the Jacques-Louis Lions Young Investigator Award 2026 to Jezabel Curbelo. The award, named after the French mathematician who spent his last decades treating the atmosphere and the ocean as mathematical problems, recognises young researchers with outstanding contributions in computational mathematics, and it has been given eleven times since 2004, always by a committee of previous medallists and awardees, working from nominations submitted by the ECCOMAS membership.

“For me it is a very special honour to receive an award that bears the name of Jacques-Louis Lions,” says Curbelo. “He was an extraordinary mathematician, with fundamental contributions to the analysis of partial differential equations and to computational mathematics, and at the same time he had a permanent concern for applications. He understood that mathematics should not develop in isolation from reality, but in continuous dialogue with it. That vision, that mathematical research can grow out of real problems and at the same time help solve them, connects deeply with the way I do research. So I am very proud to receive the ECCOMAS Jacques-Louis Lions Award for Young Scientists in Computational Mathematics. This recognition motivates me to keep working in that direction.”

The Lions award is handed over every two years at the ECCOMAS Congress, this year the 17th World Congress on Computational Mechanics, in Munich from 19 to 24 July. Alongside Curbelo, the 2026 list includes Ole Sigmund (Technical University of Denmark) with the Euler medal, Matthias Faes (TU Dortmund) with the Zienkiewicz award for computational engineering sciences, Peter Wriggers (Leibniz University Hannover) with the first ECCOMAS Mentor Award, and Anna Skorupa (Silesian University of Technology) with the Young Investigators Committee grant.

“That vision, that mathematical research can grow out of real problems and at the same time help solve them, connects deeply with the way I do research.”

Curbelo works on fluid that can’t be brought into a laboratory: the atmosphere, the ocean, the rock circulating slowly beneath the Earth’s crust. The approach is Lagrangian. Rather than measuring the flow at fixed points on a grid, she releases fictitious particles across the whole field and follows them forwards and backwards through several days of weather, letting the structures that organise the flow appear where the particles travel farthest.

That was the basis of JetLag, published in April with Louis Rivoire (MIT) and Marianna Linz (Harvard University), which reconstructs 85 years of jet stream positions by treating jets as transport barriers rather than as regions of fast wind. Rivoire and Curbelo call the jet the backbone of the atmosphere. The method’s sensitivity to its own settings is more than fifty times lower than that of the wind-threshold approach it competes with, which starts to matter when the question on the table is whether jet streams are drifting poleward in a warming climate.

The Lions award joins a list that started early. The American Geophysical Union gave her the Donald L. Turcotte Award in 2015, for a thesis on instabilities in convecting geophysical fluids, and the Vicent Caselles prize arrived the same year. Then the SEMA Antonio Valle prize in 2020, a L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science fellowship, a BBVA Foundation Leonardo grant in 2022, and, last May at the Palau de Pedralbes, the Premio Nacional de Investigación for young researchers.

She currently leads CLaCos, a Ramón Areces Foundation project using coherent structures in atmospheric and oceanic flows as indicators of climate change, and serves as Deputy Director of Research in the UPC Department of Mathematics and as Science Officer for turbulence, transport and diffusion at the European Geosciences Union.