The Spanish-Portuguese Local Chapter of the Controlled Release Society (SPLC-CRS) has awarded the 2024 SPLC-CRS Best PhD Thesis Award to María Vivero López, who completed her Doctoral Thesis in the ID-Farma group.

The award was delivered during the 15th SPLC-CRS Conference held in Lisbon from February 14 to 16, following a highly competitive evaluation process. The CRS is the most relevant scientific society worldwide in the field of drug delivery systems and nanomedicine. The SPLC-CRS Best PhD Thesis Award rewards those doctoral theses that accredit a high level of researcher training in the field of design and characterization of advanced medicines and that have given rise to scientific results published in high-impact indexed journals. In this edition, the award was presented by Prof. Nicholas Peppas, from the University of Texas at Austin, world leader in the field and Honorary Doctor from USC.

The award-winning Doctoral Thesis “Prophylaxis and topical treatment of infections associated with hearing aids and contact lenses” was carried out under the direction of professors Carmen Alvarez Lorenzo and Angel Concheiro Nine from the Faculty of Pharmacy and the Institute of Materials (iMATUS) of the USC and focused on the development of new procedures to incorporate drugs into medical devices. Specifically, María explored different approaches to provide hearing aids and contact lenses with the capacity to sustainably deliver substances capable of preventing the formation of biofilms or addressing already established infections. The work was carried out from a multidisciplinary perspective in collaboration with the University College of London (United Kingdom), the Instituto Superior Técnico of Lisbon (Portugal) and the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain). Currently, María has joined Prof. Morgan Alexander’s group as a postdoc at the University of Nottingham with a postdoctoral fellowship from the Ramón Areces Foundation.