The mural, created by the Cordoban artist Clara Gómez Campos, is located on the façade of CEIP Carles Salvador, in the Benimaclet neighborhood of Valencia. Its inauguration is part of the events for the International Day of Women and Girls in Science.

 

Ana Conesa, a research professor at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in the Institute for Integrative Systems Biology  (I2SysBio), a joint center of the CSIC and the University of Valencia, participated this morning in the unveiling of her mural as part of the Dones de Ciència (Women in Science) project. This initiative, led by the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) and Las Naves, is supported by the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) under the Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities. The mural serves as a tribute to the scientist, an international leader in computational biology and the first bioinformatician to be inducted into the Royal Academy of Engineering of Spain.

The mural, located on the façade of CEIP Carles Salvador in the Valencian neighborhood of Benimaclet, was created by the Cordoban artist Clara Gómez Campos. Its unveiling is part of the events organized by UPV in celebration of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, which takes place on Tuesday, February 11.

Spanning 26 meters in length and nearly 5 meters in height, the mural features essential elements of Ana Conesa’s research and life: a cell, an RNA strand, a microscope, and a computer—representing the computational techniques she currently works with—as well as a globe in her hands, symbolizing the international scope of her science and her concern for the environment. At the center of it all is a portrait of Ana Conesa, painted in the vibrant and cheerful colors characteristic of Clara Gómez Campos' work.

"Without a doubt, this has been a great challenge for me. I had never painted such a large mural before, and I am absolutely thrilled with the result. Ana played a crucial role in helping me prepare the sketch, and the entire school was incredibly supportive. It was wonderful to see the children observing the mural's progress, asking me what each element represented and who the woman in the painting was. To me, this initiative is fantastic because it highlights remarkable scientists like Ana and also gives visibility to female artists like myself," said Clara Gómez Campos.

For her part, Ana Conesa expressed her "immense gratitude for this beautiful tribute from Dones de Ciència, especially because it is in my own neighborhood and comes from the university where I studied."

An agricultural engineer by training at UPV, Ana Conesa is now a research professor at CSIC in the Institute for Integrative Systems Biology (I2SysBio), a joint center of CSIC and the University of Valencia. She is also the first bioinformatician to be inducted into the Royal Academy of Engineering of Spain.

Conesa emphasized that the mural accurately represents bioinformatics, “a discipline that is not widely known but has been crucial to many of the latest breakthroughs in biomedicine. Moreover, women are underrepresented in this field, which makes this mural even more significant—it helps bring visibility to both women in science and the field of bioinformatics as a whole.”

 

41 Murals, 82 Women Honored

Dones de Ciència has become a nationally recognized initiative. In fact, it has received prestigious awards: in 2022, it was honored with the award for Best Singular Project at the Prismas—Spain’s most important prizes for science communication—and in 2019, it was named Best Science Communication Project by the National Network of Scientific Culture and Innovation Units (UCC+i).

With the mural dedicated to Ana Conesa, the project now includes 41 artworks, each created by a different artist. In just over a week, as a conclusion to the events organized for 11F (February 11, International Day of Women and Girls in Science), the 42nd mural will be unveiled, this time honoring the Catalan researcher Carme Torras. The mural, created by Valencian artist Irene Remón, will be displayed at IES Benicalap in Valencia.

Since its inception in 2019, the project has been supported by the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) under the Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities.

 

Ana Conesa Cegarra

Ana Conesa is a research professor at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and an adjunct professor at the University of Florida (USA). She is a full member of the Royal Academy of Engineering of Spain, an honorary member of the Spanish Society for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, and a member of the Board of Directors of the International Society for Computational Biology.

Her laboratory, ConesaLab (conesalab), develops computational methods for studying transcriptome functionality and integrating multi-omics data to model developmental and disease-related processes. Her lab has created more than twenty software tools used by tens of thousands of researchers worldwide. She has been a pioneer in developing computational methods for applying single-molecule sequencing technologies to transcriptome analysis.

Conesa has led numerous international projects and research consortia in computational biology, coordinating over thirty international teams and securing funding from the European Commission, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation, and NASA, among others. She serves as an advisor to funding agencies and research institutes worldwide and has designed and taught bioinformatics courses on five continents, training over a thousand researchers. She is also the founder and former Chief Scientific Officer of Biobam Bioinformatics, a company that develops user-friendly software for genomic research.