Luis Vega, National Research Award 2021

The Ministry of Science and Innovation has recognised the work of the UPV/EHU professor in the area of Mathematics and Information and Communication Technologies

Julio Rey Pastor National Prize in the area of Mathematics and Information and Communication Technologies has been awarded to Luis Vega González, Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of the Basque Country and coordinator of the Analysis of Partial Differential Equations area and Principal Researcher of the Severo Ochoa accreditation of the Basque Centre for Applied Mathematics – BCAM.

Created in 1982, the national research awards, organised by the Ministry of Science and Innovation, aim to recognise the merit of Spanish researchers who are carrying out outstanding professional work of international relevance, and who contribute “exceptionally to the advancement of science, to a better understanding of human beings and their coexistence, to the transfer of technology and to the progress of humanity”.

The jury of the Julio Rey Pastor National Prize highlighted Luis Vega’s “excellence of his research work and its applications to the study of harmonic analysis for dispersive differential equations, which have had a very singular scientific impact in the field”. The jury also highlighted the international projection of the candidate and, in short, the contribution of his scientific work to both the theoretical and practical fields of Mathematics.

“It is a great joy and a strong stimulus. Many years of shared effort with my colleagues and students have been very pleasantly rewarded. I joined the UPV/EHU’s Faculty of Science and Technology in 1993 thanks to the receptiveness of the Department of Mathematics. The support of this institution and later of BCAM, one of the research centres of the Basque Government’s BERC programme, has been constant. Without this support, and the fundamental support of my family, this success would not have been possible. Thank you all very much”, said Luis Vega.

Luis Vega González (Madrid, 1960) graduated in Mathematics from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 1982. He received his doctorate in 1988 from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM) and after a two-year stay at the University of Chicago he joined the UAM. In 1993 he joined the University of the Basque Country, where he has been Professor of Mathematical Analysis since 1995.

Professor Vega is currently the Principal Investigator of the Severo Ochoa accreditation at BCAM and a world-renowned expert in partial differential equations and Fourier analysis. He has been vice-president of the Spanish Royal Mathematical Society (RSME) and member of the Spanish Society of Applied Mathematics (SEMA), and he is currently an officer of the International Council of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM). He is also a member of the Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences, the European Academy of Sciences and the Academia Europaea.

In his extensive career, Prof. Vega has been awarded for his research work on several occasions: in 2012 he received the Euskadi Research Award and Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (Inaugural Class), and in 2015 he received the Blaise Pascal Medal in Mathematics.

He also leads the HADE project (Harmonic Analysis and Differential Equations: new challenges) funded by the European Research Council.