Ana García-Herraiz, PhD student at the Suero group, and Andreu Tortajada Navarro, PhD student at the Martín group, have been awarded the 1st and 3rd prize of the Reaxys-RSEQ Early Career Researcher Award this week.

For a second year, Elsevier and the Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry have organized Early Career Researcher Award. To participate, young researchers have written an essay highlighting how the use of the Reaxys scientific platform has helped them on a daily basis to develop and advance their research projects. “You can use the platform in different ways depending on what part of your project you are working on. From looking for hints to develop a naive idea to searching reaction conditions for the synthesis of starting materials,” explains García-Heraiz who won the 1st prize with her essay “How Reaxys enabled reaction discovery with carbyne equivalents.” García-Herraiz is already planning on spending the 1000-euro award on rock-climbing material and a skiing course.

The two winners have received the prizes at a ceremony in Toledo during the XV Young Researchers Toledo Symposium organised by the Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry. The symposium aims to showcase high-quality work and promote collaboration among researchers to achieve excellent research. To this end, the second day of the symposium the awardees gave 20-minute talks explaining their research projects to their peers. “This is a good opportunity to show the research we are carrying out to the young Spanish scientific community, getting useful feedback and learning about the chemistry that others are doing right now in Spain,” explains Tortajada-Navarro who has won 3rd prize and will spend his 500 euros on a trip to Norway to see the Northern Lights with some colleagues from the laboratory.