BIFI researcher María Pilar Catalán delivers the University of Zaragoza’s inaugural lecture for the 2026-2027 academic year
Professor María Pilar Catalán Rodríguez, Chair of Botany at the University of Zaragoza and a BIFI (Institute for Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems) researcher, was responsible for delivering the inaugural lecture at the opening ceremony of the 2026-2027 academic year. The ceremony took place last Friday, September 18, at the Paraninfo building of the University of Zaragoza.
An Integrative Approach to Botany
Under the title “Systematic and Evolutionary Botany, an Integrative Vision,” Catalán set out to answer the question of why research in Botany matters, while at the same time offering a general and up-to-date overview of this science.
To this end, she presented the advances achieved by botanists in several highly relevant areas, ranging from classical morpho-anatomical taxonomy to pangenomics, focusing in particular on those fields in which her own team has contributed from an evolutionary perspective and in which they have the most experience.
Through these advances, she noted, Botany allows for a better understanding of the enormous plant diversity on the planet, the evolutionary relationships between species, their geographic distribution, their adaptation processes, and the mechanisms that explain their development, diversification, and evolutionary history.
An Institutional Event
The event, which marks the official start of the university year, was led by the President of the Government of Aragón, Jorge Azcón, and the Rector of the University of Zaragoza, Rosa Bolea. During the ceremony, the official inauguration of newly appointed university faculty also took place.
