Sandra Díaz, a brilliant mind recognized in the world
For the second time, Sandra Díaz was selected as one of the World's Most Influential Scientific Minds.
Sandra Díaz, CONICET senior researcher at the Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biología Vegetal (IMBIV, CONICET-UNC), is the only Argentine who works in the country and is part of the list of researchers of the “World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds 2015” made by the Thomson Reuters’ Science and Intellectual Property Unit. The second Argentine on the list is Juan Martín Maldacena but he conducts his studies in the USA.
Thomson Reuters is a world leader producer of bibliometric statistics and one of the main sources of “impact factors” used to evaluate scientific production. Every year, this Unit makes a list of the scientists who have been most cited by their colleagues and represent one per cent of the most influential ones, a number that covers only three thousand researchers in all the world. Analysts assessed more than 120 thousands that were indexed and published during the period between 2003 and 2013 in 21 areas of knowledge.
“This type of statistics shows colleagues’ recognition. It is stimulating for us to know that our knowledge is useful for other groups of researchers. We endeavor not to restrict ourselves to using established concepts, the objective is to open the way for fundamental science to have original ideas”, Díaz affirms.
Apart from being a CONICET researcher, Sandra Díaz is a principal professor at the Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales of the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba and leads the Núcleo DiverSus de Investigaciones en Diversidad y Sustentabilidad [Research into Diversity and Sustainability]. Her studies are focused on the field of Environment and Ecology and she made important contributions to community and ecosystems ecology, macroecology and biodiversity in relation to global environmental change.
“Our job was to develop a broad spectrum that ranges from theoretical plant ecology to the contribution of the regional problems resolution in connection with social sciences. I think that it is important not to leave out conceptual innovations when addressing concrete issues”, the scientist comments. Her latest most important study, which covered a for the first time a global spectrum of the shape and function of plants from all the planet, was published on December 23rd in Nature magazine