During 2023, Drs. Juan Gallo, Marcelo Villar, and Claudio Cavasotto were recognized locally and internationally for their contributions in the fields of ophthalmology, neuroscience, and medicinal and biomolecular chemistry, respectively.
ARVO Gold Fellow, a first for a Latino ophthalmologist.
Dr. Juan Gallo, principal investigator at CONICET and director of the Institute for Translational Medicine Research (IIMT), received the ARVO Gold Fellow award, becoming the first Latin American ophthalmologist to receive this recognition from the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO). Founded in 1928 in Washington, D.C., ARVO is the world's largest and most respected organization of its kind, with 10.000 researchers in more than 75 countries.
Throughout his career, Gallo focused on developing a professional profile as a clinical physician and researcher. He earned his doctorate at the Karolinska Institute (Sweden), where he led a study on the ocular sequelae of prematurity, published in the American Journal of Ophthalmology and the British Journal of Ophthalmology. Upon returning to Argentina, he joined the founding team of the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences and dedicated himself to the development of corneal stem cell transplantation, the results of which were published in scientific journals in the United States.
Currently, he is dedicated to studying the damage that can be generated in the retina as a consequence of diabetes, combining his role as a researcher with teaching at the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences and with his activity in the Ophthalmology Service of the Austral University Hospital.
In the top 2% of the world's best scientists in his discipline.
Dr. Claudio Cavasotto, head of the Computational Drug Design and Biomedical Informatics Laboratory at IIMT, was included for the fourth consecutive year in the “World's Top 2% Scientist List”, the ranking of the world's most outstanding scientists, compiled by Stanford University.
He ranked 414th out of 99.369 researchers (top 0,4%) in his specialty "Medicinal and Biomolecular Chemistry", being the only one of the Universidad Austral, and the first in Argentina in this discipline.
The “World's Top 2% Scientist List”, led by the prestigious epidemiologist and statistician John PA Ioannidis, is based on the analysis of approximately 10 million scientists worldwide, separated into 22 areas and 176 sub-areas of research, using the Scopus database.
Dr. Cavasotto specializes in computational simulation of biomacromolecules, computer-aided drug design, and biomedical informatics. In 2021, he was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), Europe's largest organization for the advancement of chemical sciences.
Currently, he is a principal investigator at CONICET in the IIMT, and scientific director of the Institute of Applied Artificial Intelligence of the Universidad Austral, and tenured professor in the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences and in the Faculty of Engineering.
Neuroscientist at IIMT, among the best in the country.
Dr. Marcelo Villar ranks 6th among the top neuroscience researchers in Argentina, according to the Research.com Ranking. This ranking is based on the H-index, which considers the number of publications and citations received by each scientist, thus measuring their productivity and impact. With 120 publications and 7.689 citations, Dr. Villar has an H-index of 44.
Since joining CONICET as a researcher in 1990, Dr. Villar has had a productive scientific career, initially focusing on neuroendocrinology until reaching what has been and is his main area of work: the study of the mechanisms underlying chronic pain.
He trained fellows and researchers who made his team a leading authority on pain in the country. He also created, along with Drs. Pablo Brumovsky and Cecilia Catanesi, the Translational Research Network on Pain, with the aim of enabling experts in basic and applied research from different disciplines to make significant contributions to the study, diagnosis, and treatment of pain.
Villar studied Medicine and earned his doctorate at the University of Buenos Aires. Upon returning from his postdoctoral studies in Sweden, he worked on the design of the Medical Degree program and the founding of the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires. Universidad Austral, of which he was dean for two terms.
He was rector of the Universidad Austral, president of the Science, Technology and Business Park of the Universidad Austral and founder of the Institute for Translational Medicine Research (Conicet-Universidad Austral), where he currently carries out his research work.
