Vocal Artist - Singer, Songwriter, Composer and Social Activist

With a career spanning 40 years, and 45 recorded albums, Alexia has developed her own authentic, eclectic, sophisticated musical sound, informed and inspired by a plethora of influences and genres - Jazz, Classical, Electronic, Experimental, Improvisation, Avant-garde, Trip hop, World music, Gospel, Spiritual and Folk.
Alexia is the first female vocalist to bring Classic American Jazz to the Hellenic / Greek-speaking world, pushing the musical boundaries, and her artistic evolution, Alexia's legato phrasing, a technique that displays a continuous motion between notes, as well as, rubato, meaning "to steal" rhythmical patterns, either preceding or following the downbeat, can be heard in her album, «Alexia in a Jazz Mood», in which she collaborates and features Jazz legend, Chick Corea, during a time when Jazz was an underground scene, paving the way for vocal jazz in Greece and Cyprus.

Alexia's activist work is at the core of her foundation and principles. She has long symbolized Hope, Inspiration, Inclusion, and Acceptance for all. Her voice represents all Human Beings and her platform has repeatedly been utilized to promote and encourage Change.
Throughout her career, she has taken a stance for Human Dignity and has shed light on gender inequality, sexual violence, human trafficking, women's rights, children, the youth, refugees, migrants, LGTBQI people, and other groups of citizens. As a woman and as a displaced refugee herself, Alexia understands the importance of raising awareness and taking a stance for human rights.

She studied General Basic Education in a secondary school in Cantabria, where she was born and where her vocation for physics was born.
She entered the University of Cantabria, obtaining her degree and PhD in physical sciences. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Physics of Cantabria, IFCA from 2001 to 2007 and at the National Institute of Nuclear Physics of the University of Padua, Italy, between 2007 and 2009. In 2012 she was a researcher in the Particle Physics group at the Institute of Physics of Cantabria. In 2006, Alicia Calderón Tazón was awarded first prize in the III Technology-Based Companies Competition.

Based in Switzerland, this Spanish scientist is part of the team that discovered the Higgs boson. It is a type of particle and is believed to play a fundamental role in the origin of mass in the Universe. Although its existence has been known since the 1960s, its existence could not be proven until 2014.
One of the people responsible for this discovery was Alicia Calderón, together with other researchers, who analysed all the data extracted from the experiments using the particle accelerator at CERN (Switzerland). This analysis confirmed the theories that proved the existence of the Higgs boson.
Dr. Calderón works for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and focuses her research on the study of the Higgs boson.
The High Energies group at the Cantabria Physics Institute, of which Alicia Calderón is a member, has led the search for the acclaimed Higgs boson in the two W boson decay channel, one of the three channels that led to its discovery. The discovery is historic and had worldwide repercussions, because it is the last missing piece to complete the Standard Model of Particle Physics, which describes everything we know about the elementary particles that make up everything we see and how they interact with each other.

Currently, he has focused his work on the search for dark matter.

In 2006, Alicia Calderón Tazón was awarded first prize in the III Technology-Based Companies Competition.

Dr. Calderón works for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and focuses her research on the study of the Higgs boson.
The High Energies group at the Cantabria Physics Institute, of which Alicia Calderón is a member, has led the search for the acclaimed Higgs boson in the two W boson decay channel, one of the three channels that led to its discovery. The discovery is historic and had worldwide repercussions, because it is the last missing piece to complete the Standard Model of Particle Physics, which describes everything we know about the elementary particles that make up everything we see and how they interact with each other.

Currently, he has focused his work on the search for dark matter.

Alicia Calderón, from her experience, considers that women have to put more effort into demonstrating knowledge than men and that they even have to repeat ideas several times to be heard. The researcher finds differences between the people of different nationalities with whom she works, but "in general the proportion of women is much lower than that of men". In her opinion, very good research is done in Spain, but we have few resources, which makes it difficult for us to keep up with other countries. We need to invest more in research in order to make progress as a society.
Few people may know their names, but Spain has renowned women scientists who have made fundamental contributions to science and who today dedicate their lives to research.
There is plenty of female talent, but in the world of science there is a large gender gap that prevents women scientists from reaching higher ranks or leading teams. The number of women PhD graduates in Spain - 39% of the total - is close to the number of men, but the inequality increases as one moves up the research career ladder.
Some of the causes of inequality that women researchers find are the different education levels of men and women, the machismo that prevails in the most demanding professions, and childcare, which continues to fall mostly on women in an age group in which competition in scientific careers is at its highest. It is also true that there is some light, the percentage of women researchers remains above the European Union average (33%) and the data reflect slow progress compared to previous years.
The truth is that if there is slow progress in reducing inequality between women and men in the field of science, it is largely because public gender plans are gradually increasing, initiatives to fight for equality are growing and so are the groups that are responsible for raising awareness of the problem. This is the case of the Women in Science Office (WISE) of the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), which was created in 2012 to raise awareness of the gender gap and seek solutions; or the Association of Women Researchers and Technologists (AMIT), which fights to make the work of women scientists visible and publicly denounces cases of discrimination.
On the other hand, Alicia Calderón participates in initiatives such as Stem Talent Girl, a project for the development of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) talent and the promotion of scientific-technological vocations aimed specifically at women with the objective of inspiring future generations of women leaders in science and technology (MasScience, 2020).
She concludes:
"Women have to put more effort into demonstrating knowledge than men and even have to repeat ideas several times to be heard" (MasScience, 2020).

She studied medicine at the University of Athens , where she was awarded a doctorate , and continued her studies in Paris (where she worked at the Necker Hospital), and in London.

Biology

was honored with the Order of Eupoia.
She also received the Greek Royal Order of Welfare award.

She established the Greek Foundation for Basic Biological Research "Alexander Fleming" and "created the conditions to set up" the Biomedical Sciences Research Centre "Alexander Fleming" (often referred to as BSRC "Alexander Fleming" and the Alexander Fleming Biomedical Sciences Research Center),in Vari, a suburb of Athens.

During the dictatorship he developed intense anti-dictatorship activity and was arrested in August 1971, on charges that he was planning the escape of Aleko Panagoulis . After twenty-five days of interrogation, during which he was tortured, tried and convicted by the extraordinary military court of Athens.

Arts, textiles, and languages

2018 Global Teacher Prize winner

She has worked her entire teaching career of 12 years at Alperton Community School and was promoted to Deputy Head of Art within a year of her arrival. She is now Associate Deputy Headteacher leading on staff professional development.

There are about 130 languages spoken in the London Borough of Brent and Ms Zafirakou has taught herself the basic phrases used by children in about 35 of them - including Hindi, Gujarati and Tamil - in an effort to build links with her pupils and their families.

She redesigned the curriculum with fellow teachers to make it relevant to pupils and helped set up girls-only sports clubs for those from conservative communities

She is an Arts and Textiles teacher at Alperton Community School in northwest London, England.

Ángela studied at the Teacher’s School in León.

In 1917 she was appointed teacher and director of the school of La Pola de Gordón (León). A year later, she obtained a teaching position in the National Teacher's Examinations.
When the school closed and she finished her classes as a teacher at the school, she dedicated herself to teaching the parents of her students to read in order to help reduce illiteracy at the time. In 1945, during Franco's dictatorship, she taught at the Escuela Obrera, a free workers' school.
Her innovative and nonconformist vocation stands out and the motivation that led her to invent her mechanical book was to help students learn in a comfortable and attractive way and to adapt the teaching to the level of each student. A progressive character, she decided to become a teacher in order to achieve economic independence from the rural world. At the age of 40, she became a widow and raised her three daughters on her own. With a great fighting spirit, she believed in her ideas and dreamed of progress and knowledge accessible to everyone.
She had to fight with many men to carry out her project. At the International Exhibition of Inventions and New Techniques in Geneva in 1968, she was the only woman to receive an award among Spanish inventors. Although she received national and international awards and recognition, her condition as a woman and provincial teacher meant that the scientific community was not interested in her project, nor did she receive financial support from the institutions.

She graduated from school in the year 1962 and wanted to study biology; although medicine interested her as well. In order to decide on her course of action, she enrolled in a month-long nursing course and decided against studying medicine. Till the year 1964, she dabbled between biology and physics trying to decide the best choice of career but she found biology boring while another course in physics turned out to be too tough after a point. Then, she came to a realisation that a new course in biochemistry was being taught at Tubingen and thus, she joined the university.

She graduated with a Diploma in Biochemistry in the year 1969 and earned a Ph.D. at the University of Tübingen in 1974 for her research into Protein–DNA interactions and the binding of RNA polymerase in Escherichia coli.

Genetics and developmental biology

She became the director of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen in 1985. In 1986, she received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is the highest honor awarded in German research. In 1995, she shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine with Eric Wieschaus and Edward B. Lewis, for “their discoveries concerning the genetic control of early embryonic development.”

Finding the crucial genes:
In 1978, at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and her counterpart, Eric Wieschaus began trying to find the decisive genes for the early embryonic development of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Their numerous and rapidly developing offspring make the fruit fly the ideal research subject, especially as genetically altered individuals (mutants) are easily detected. Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus produced and examined approximately 20,000 Drosophila mutants. As a result, they were able to find the 15 crucial genes.

Serving science and society:
Geneticist Edward Lewis pointed out the similarity between the genes of the fruit fly and human genes. Through her later work on zebrafish, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard gained valuable insights into the developmental genes of vertebrates. The similarity in the developmental genes of certain animals and humans is of significant interest to medical research and connected to hopes that this may provide new knowledge about the pathogenesis of cancer. Besides her concrete research work, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard also rendered outstanding services to science. In 2004, for instance, she established a foundation in her name which supports young mothers of all nationalities in their careers as researchers.