Pompeu Fabra University professors Jordi Alonso, Roderic Guigó and Àngel Lozano appear in the list of the world’s most influential scientists published by Clarivate Analytics, a company that provides services in research, patents and other areas related to innovation. The Highly Cited Researchers list, which contains over 3,300 scientists, includes a total of twenty Catalan scientists. The scientists that appear have been selected from among the top 1% most cited in 21 fields of research. They therefore have the greatest impact in their respective areas of research.

It is estimated that worldwide about seven million people are engaged in scientific research, although this figure is difficult to establish. Thus, the 3,300 names on the list would account for about 0.05% of all of scientists in the world. To draw up the classification, the experts at Clarivate Analytics have taken into account 130,000 articles by 900 institutions from all over the world.

A multidisciplinary classification

Among the 21 research disciplines into which the list can be split, the UPF professors are in the areas of psychology/psychiatry, with Jordi Alonso; molecular biology and genetics, with Roderic Guigó, and computer science, with Àngel Lozano.

Jordi Alonso is a full professor of Preventive Medicine and Public Health with the Department of Experimental and Health Sciences at UPF. He directs the Epidemiology and Public Health Programme at the Hospital del Mar Research Medical Institute (IMIM), where he investigates the perception of health and the frequency and the burden of mental illnesses, as well as their determinants in the population. He is also an associate researcher of the CIBER in Epidemiology and Public Health.

Full professor of Biomedical Informatics at UPF, Roderic Guigó is the coordinator of the research programme in Bioinformatics and Genomics at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona (CRG). His research group, Computational Biology of RNA Processing, studies the signals that guide the passage of DNA to RNA and protein sequences.

The former vice-rector for Research at UPF, Àngel Lozano, is a full professor with the Department of Information and Communication Technologies. He currently leads the Wireless Communications Research Group (WiCom), where he investigates wireless communications from various disciplines, such as information theory, communications, signal processing, estimation and cryptography .

The other researchers who appear on the list belong to the August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBAPS), the University of Barcelona, the Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO), the Sant Pau Biomedical Research Institute, the Ecological and Forestry Applications Research Centre (CREAF), The Doñana Biological Station, and the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Castelldefels.